Soft Skills, Attitudes and Personality Traits in Operations and Supply Chain Management: systematic review and taxonomy proposal through ProKnow-C methodology

The human factor impact on Operations Management (OM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) performances is now more than ever acknowledged by both scientific research and industrial organisations, which are increasingly focusing on the assessment of the interplay between the human role and the achievement of high levels of competitiveness. Indeed, as a sign of interest in the subject, the trend of publications on the “Behavioural Operations Management” (BeOps) research field has seen a remarkable increase over the last five years. In this context, soft skills, personality traits, attitudes and behavioural skills are some of the elements and terms on which attention is being paid to understand how specific individual human aspects can lead to superior business performance and operational excellence. However, though several efforts have been made to identify and classify the different skills and attitudes required to successfully operate in the OM and SCM sectors, the difficulty in classifying and clarifying the meaning of the adopted terminology appears significant. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the difference in vocabulary between "Soft Skills", "Attitudes", and "Personality Traits", to clarify their adoption and main application areas and to propose a taxonomy for their usage within organisations. To achieve this objective, the “Knowledge Development Process method” (ProKnow-C) is applied to systematically analyse the scientific background on the abovementioned topic and carry out bibliometric and content analyses of the literature. An analysis of a portfolio of over 2000 articles allows to identify a comprehensive taxonomy for the BeOps field and lays the foundations for a systematized development of this research area, which tends to be unstructured and multifaceted.