Competency need assessment: a gap analytic approach

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to adopt a gap analytic approach to identify competency needs and further estimate the strength of such managerial competencies in predicting job performance. Design/methodology/approach: A structured questionnaire was administered on 106 managers from 18 pharmaceutical companies in Maharashtra, India to capture their self-perceptions on importance of competencies, current expertise levels and job performance. Further, relative competence metric, t-test and multiple regression analysis was employed for data analysis. Findings: Results indicate incongruence in perceptions of managers for current expertise and importance across four managerial competencies, i.e., analytic skills, self-management, relationship management and goal and action management. Further, gap analysis and relative competence metric reveals negative gaps among managers for competency dimensions pertaining to quantitative ability, adaptability, influence co-workers, change management skills and planning and task execution. Furthermore, self-management competencies are found to wield maximum influence on the self-perceptions of job performance followed closely by relationship management and analytic skills. Originality/value: To the best knowledge of the authors, no study exists from pharmaceutical sector in India on managerial competencies and its impact on job performance. Also, authors have not come across any study in India that captures the competency needs through gap analysis and relative competence metric. This study attempts to fill both the aforementioned gaps in literature.