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The value of soft skills has been highlighted by a growing body of research and evidence over the past three decades. Soft skills have become an essential quality for managers to effectively manage their team and job in the corporate world irrespective of the sector. Along with professional qualification and domain knowledge, today’s professionals need to possess a high soft skills quotient in order to succeed in this competitive era (Jessy, 2009). Hard skills contribute to only 15% of one’s success, while the remaining 85% is contributed by soft skills (Watts and Watts, 2008). Research shows that individuals with good interpersonal and self-management abilities have better career success and contribute far more to their organizations rather than people with only excellent technical skills (Bush, 2012).
According to Parente et al. (2012), the complexity of skill development, regardless of how it is done, is readily evident when it is recognized that not only is there a set of traditional management skills (so-called ‘hard skills’, e.g., planning, decision-making and problem-solving) that managers must possess, but that managers also need a set of soft skills (e.g., leadership, motivation and conflict resolution) in order to be effective (McManus, 1995; Halfhill and Nielsen, 2007; and Lyons, 2007). In addition, recent trends have seen an increasing emphasis being placed on teams to tap into higher levels of diversity. These pressures in turn require managers to acquire experience and skills in working and managing in a team environment (Michalisin et al., 2004a) and in effectively developing and utilizing more diverse workforce (Roberson and Park, 2007; and Qin et al., 2009).
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