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Soft skills, hard skills, and individual innovativeness

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Abstract

This paper contributes to the literature on skills and innovativeness of employees at the individual level. Based on a properly designed empirical analysis, the findings improve our understanding of the relation between soft skills, hard skills and individual innovativeness. Cross-sectional data of Indonesian firms from different industries are used from an online survey on manager and worker perceptions related to individual innovation performance on the one hand and individual skills on the other hand. The results show that soft skills and hard skills are significantly and positively associated with individual level innovativeness. However, no complementarity (positive interaction effect) is found between soft skills and hard skills.

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Notes

  1. A Likert scale is an interval scale that is used to calculate the composite value (mean) of a factor. The factor is comprised of several variables. Boone and Boone (2012) explain the data processing procedures of a Likert scale. Likert scale data measurements are interval scale measurements that use numbers to specify the order and significant relative distance between points on the scale. They do not have an absolute zero. They are different from ratio scale data measurements (e.g., working duration in years) which have an absolute zero. Therefore, descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviations can be used for the analysis of Likert scale data. Regression procedures can be used for further analysis.

  2. Cronbach’s Alpha is the most widely used reliability measurements. A Factor with Cronbach’s Alpha value of equal to and higher than 0.6 is considered to be acceptable (Peterson 1994; Upadhyay and Baber 2013).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School Human Behaviour in Social and Economic Changes (GSBC), Friedrich Schiller University, (FSU), Jena, Germany

    Achmad Fajar Hendarman & Uwe Cantner

  2. School of Business and Management, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia

    Achmad Fajar Hendarman

  3. Department of Marketing and Management, I2M Group, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Uwe Cantner

Authors
  1. Achmad Fajar Hendarman
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  2. Uwe Cantner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Achmad Fajar Hendarman.

Appendix

Appendix

See Appendix Tables 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.

Table 7 Summary Statistics
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Table 8 Correlation
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Table 9 Variance inflation factor (VIF) of the model (3): multicollinearity checking
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Table 10 Indonesia Reference: Total Employees based on Firm Size.
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Table 11 Total respondents based on firm size and industry.
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Table 12 Indonesia Reference: Total Industrial Contribution to the Total GDP (2014).
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Table 13 Private/public employment with the highest education degree-starting from junior high school.
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Table 14 Education and employment status in Indonesia.
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Hendarman, A.F., Cantner, U. Soft skills, hard skills, and individual innovativeness. Eurasian Bus Rev 8, 139–169 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40821-017-0076-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40821-017-0076-6

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