Managerial Skills in Chinese State-owned Corporations

Recently, many Chinese state-owned corporations (SOCs) have started to change the traditional management system into the morden one. As a result, the quality of managers in SOCs has increased and their performance has improved. In this study, an effort was made to find ten most important skills for managers in Chinese SOCs:(1) that characterise their present level of managerial performance, (2) that are required for improving their managerial performance on the present job, and (3) that will be critical for Chinese managers to function effectively under the market economy situations. The results identified the common seven skills across these three different situations: namely skills of strategic thinking, profit consciousness, proper use of personnel, decision making, quality control, motivating, and innovativeness, but with a different order of importance for each situation. However, in different situations, some additional different skills were found important. In summary, most of the top ten skills were found to belong to the category of organizational development capabilities. Some differences that were found between different managerial levels and between high and low performing SOCs were discussed.