Uncovering the Competency of Middle Managers in Different Business Environments: A Knowledge Management Perspective

Top management is important in an organization, but the role of middle managers is also important. In this paper, we focus on identifying the characteristics of a middle manager or "workplace leader." The workplace leader needs to be proficient in the business of their place of work, and needs to maintain good relations between their boss and their subordinates. The workplace leader must learn various skills and be capable of using those skills. However, because business environment changes from one place of work to another, the capabilities required of a workplace leader are also varied, and no single list of required capabilities applies to workplace leaders in all situations. Additionally, it is difficult to agree who is suited to serve as a workplace leader. Because the business environment is rapidly changeable and the various conditions of industry type and occupational description are intricately entangled, the establishment of a general method is difficult. Given these difficulties, in this research we do not aim to specify an image of a universal workplace leader applicable in all organizations. Here we aim to probe the requirements for the capabilities of a workplace leader peculiar to each organization. We further aim to develop a method of prioritizing those capability requirements. We propose a method that applies the "persona technique" and the "orthogonal array" to the extracted work competency and further assigns it a priority. When determining and selecting a workplace leader, without long meaningless discussion, a decision-maker involved in human resource management can clarify the priorities of competency that the members recognize.