Competences in operations management: a literature review

It is widely recognized, both in academic and industrial context, that people’s competence and ability have a significant impact on company performance. Knowledge and expertise are the main success factors for a company, and they need a continuous development for internal personnel and focused assessment for recruiting new people. Indeed, in the last years the need for model and tools to manage competences emerges in numerous scenarios. In the area of operation management or supply chain management (OM & SCM), as in many other professional or research fields, is still not clear which the personal characteristics needed for a successful professional performance are. Moreover, the concept of competence itself is often generically used to denote different personal attributes like, for example, knowledge, skills or behaviour. This paper aims to investigate scientific literature opinion about the definition of competences in OM & SCM. More precisely, we want to clarify which personal qualities are considered to be key in this field, from a scientific point of view, with reference to professional assessment and development (be it recruitment, shifting or any other career step). In particular, we aim to investigate of what nature are the skills that must be held by those who work in the OM & SCM environment; if greater importance is attributed to behavioural qualities compared to knowledge or technical ones; if there are reference models in literature for the assessment of competences of OM & SCM; and which OM & SCM knowledge elements are precisely related to some specific human qualities. For this purpose, a prior study and terminology definition has been carried out to identify the key concepts that in the next phases will guide the research. This work is conceived to represent the first step of a research aiming to define a comprehensive reference model for competencies in OM & SCM.