Importance of competences in communication by the opinion of business leaders. Evidences from a comparative study between Hungary and Slovakia

Abstract

From the perspective of a hierarchically ordinated company, the expectations of company leaders about their employees’ necessary competencies play a greater role than the opposite. This paper observes the expectations of leaders and sub-leaders of micro-, small and medium enterprises (with various scopes of activities) about the competencies of employees in neighbouring parts of Hungary and Slovakia. The authors’ research group collected 28 scientific resources on the issue of communication competencies in order to map up 21 “common denominators” from the competence lists. Based on this shortlist, a survey was conducted with 222 respondents to measure the subjective importance of these traits and to observe the attitudes towards the effectivity of communication trainings. On the Hungarian side, speech competence proved to be the most crucial competence for business leaders, followed by attention/reflection and interpersonal communication skills. In Slovakia, persuasion was reported to be the most crucial trait, the second is the application of confirmation and feedback, and the third is speech competence. Observing the correlations between Hungarian and Slovakian judgements of each competence, Pearson’s chi-square tests show statistically significant correlations in 18 cases. In terms of communication training experiences, the group communication competencies, the assertiveness and the leadership competencies were reported as main focuses. The overall satisfactory with communication trainings neither depends on the amount of leadership experience nor on the action assignments or the nationality (i.e. the venue) of the companies. The overall satisfactory rate is 2.53 in a four-grade scale among those who ever attended communication trainings.