A structural Model of competencies influencing professional empowerment of the commanders of the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran

This study was conducted to identify the effective competencies on professional empowerment of the commanders of the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran based on a mixed approach and exploratory-descriptive method. An attempt was made to study the documents, semi-structured interview and questionnaire, while achieving the research goals, to give an appropriate answer to each of the research questions. In the first step, for the analysis of qualitative data collected from the study of documents, as well as semi-structured interviews with experts, the exploratory approach and content analysis method (thematic) were used. For this purpose, effective competencies in commanders' professional empowerment were identified and extracted. Based on the findings of this section, effective competencies in commanders' professional empowerment were identified in three dimensions including professional competencies, value competencies, cognitive competencies and eight components (command, leadership, management, revolutionary, sacrifice, knowledge, thinking and insight). In addition, in the second phase of the research, with a quantitative approach, based on structural equation modeling and with a partial least squares approach, the research hypotheses were tested to examine the effect of each competency on commanders' professional empowerment. For this purpose, descriptive and inferential statistics were used to examine and validate the hypotheses and answer the research questions. The beta coefficient calculated in the structural equations for professional, value and cognitive competencies was 0.459, 0.246 and 0.270, respectively. Therefore, among these, professional competencies had the most and value competencies had the least impact on professional empowerment from the respondents' point of view.