Designing and Verifying the Competency Model of the International Marketing Managers

Training competent managers has now developed to an important concept in management which is regarded by many scholars and industry experts as one of the main approaches for the success of various organizations and industries in national and transnational contexts. Hence, this study is aimed at developing the competency model of international marketing managers through a mixed method, and then validate it. In the first phase, using in-depth qualitative research strategy and theoretical sampling, several interviews were conducted with Iranian marketing managers active in the field of world trade until reaching saturation. In the second step, the collected data was codded and categorized following grounded theory method with the use of MAXQDA 10, leading to 638 basic concepts, 50 final sub-categories and 6 main categories: vital competencies (causal conditions), professional competencies (phenomenological conditions), interpersonal competencies (strategies), contextual conditions, intervening conditions and outcomes. In the final step, the questionnaire derived from paradigm model was distributed among international marketing managers of Iranian companies in 12 industries, and were validated by structural equation modeling method.  The results confirmed the relationships among hypotheses as well as the relationships among structures. The results also indicated that components of the model were identified correctly.