The primacy of soft skills: A definitive test of managerial strategic planning competencies and professional performance in Hungary and Kazakhstan

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Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
Strategic planning is a driver of leaders’ performance in today’s turbulent and demanding environment, yet the relative importance of soft versus hard skills within it remains insufficiently researched. This study aims to test how gender, age, and cultural context influence the distribution of soft and hard skills in strategic planning and managers’ goal attainment. Utilizing a behavioral outcome measure (high performance), we analyzed a sample of 1,468 managers from Kazakhstan (n = 694) and Hungary (n = 774), who participated in the scientifically grounded AI business simulation. A two-step analytical approach, involving PLS-SEM and logistic regression, was implemented in Python. The results demonstrate that soft skills are the dominant driver of high performance, with an Odds Ratio (OR) of 3.44, indicating they are 2.5 times more effective than hard skills. Leaders’ age exerted a negligible effect on their performance (OR = 1.02, p = 0.728). The overall sample showed no gender differences, but the country-specific analysis revealed a moderated mediation pattern where the link between gender and soft skills varies by country (p = 0.018). Managers in Kazakhstan exhibited slightly higher average softskill scores than their counterparts in Hungary (p = 0.014). Despite cultural differences, the model demonstrated consistent predictive utility in both settings, with an overall accuracy of 72.9% in Kazakhstan and 72.4% in Hungary. The designed competency model is highly stable and cross-culturally valid for predicting managerial performance. Thus, managerial excellence is driven by competencies that are largely independent of demographic characteristics across different cultural settings.

Acknowledgment
This research has been funded by the Science Committee of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan (Grant No. AP22687001) within the project titled “Designing a Conceptual Model of Managers’ Leadership Competencies in Kazakhstan through the Gender Potential Prism”.

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    • Figure 1. Conceptual model
    • Table 1. Demographics
    • Table 2. Measures and their meanings within the present study
    • Table 3. Construct reliability, validity, and factor loadings
    • Table 4. Skills by performance status
    • Table 5. Results of H1 and H2 testing
    • Table 6. Testing H3
    • Table 7. Classification table
    • Table 8. Bootstrap confidence intervals for H3
    • Table 9. Model comparison for confounding effects for testing H5
    • Table 10. Standardized path coefficients and mediation results
    • Table 11. Multi-group comparison by country
    • Table 12. Overall model fit and classification accuracy
    • Table A1. Sample distribution
    • Table A2. Performance distribution by demographics
    • Table B1. Skills composites, overall sample
    • Table C1. Correlation matrix
    • Table D1. Effect size comparison
    • Table E1. Model quality by country
    • Table E2. Descriptive statistics by country
    • Table F1. Summary of standardized effect sizes
    • Table F2. Variance inflation factors (multicollinearity check)
    • Table F3. Residual analysis (Logistic regression)
    • Table F4. Robustness checks
    • Conceptualization
      Anastassiya Lipovka, Zoltan Buzady
    • Formal Analysis
      Anastassiya Lipovka, Kuanysh Abeshev
    • Funding acquisition
      Anastassiya Lipovka
    • Methodology
      Anastassiya Lipovka, Zoltan Buzady
    • Project administration
      Anastassiya Lipovka
    • Resources
      Anastassiya Lipovka, Zoltan Buzady, Kuanysh Abeshev
    • Writing – original draft
      Anastassiya Lipovka
    • Writing – review & editing
      Anastassiya Lipovka, Zoltan Buzady, Kuanysh Abeshev
    • Data curation
      Zoltan Buzady, Kuanysh Abeshev
    • Investigation
      Zoltan Buzady
    • Supervision
      Zoltan Buzady
    • Software
      Kuanysh Abeshev
    • Validation
      Kuanysh Abeshev
    • Visualization
      Kuanysh Abeshev
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    Acknowledgment
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