ABSTRACT
The various managerial paradigms in the past century or so drew on historical developments in production and technology, as economies moved from manufacturing and production to service-driven and knowledge-based work. As a consequence, old paradigms of managing the workforce began to lose their relevance, a fact that was naturally reflected in the evolution of managerial thinking – from Frederick Taylor through to Peter Drucker and Henry Mintzberg. What are generally described as soft skills have increasingly been viewed as an essential complement to the technical know-how required to manage organizations. The new realities of globally distributed teams and diverse cultural and demographic settings increasingly call for a broader set of skills: interpersonal and communication competencies, “sense-making” in different cultural contexts, and those elusive notions we broadly refer to as emotional intelligence and empathy.
