Identification of Clusters of Managerial Skills for Increased Effectiveness : The Case of the Steel Industry in Iran

Managerial skills are viewed as being of fundamental importance for improved managerial performance and effectiveness as the whole. Recent developments in the field point to the presence of three paramount and overlapping categories of managerial skills namely, task-, people- and self-related, that play a crucial role towards increasing the effectiveness of the senior managers in both private and public sector organisations. The results of a survey of executive and senior managers in the steel industry of Iran point to the emergence of distinct patterns delineating clusters of skills with various degrees of generalisability to the universe of managerial skills. It is concluded that while people-related skills are strongly interrelated, and should be regarded as an integrated set of skills, the same does not apply, at least to the same extent, to the other two categories of skills. People-related skills, however, constitute the most important category for the increased effectiveness of senior managers, irrespective of their position in the hierarchy