Two Meanings of “Social Skills”: Proposing an Integrative Social Skills Framework

Business leaders and HR professionals have long recognized the importance of social skills for effective organizational functioning, particularly in roles requiring high levels of interpersonal interaction. Accordingly, organizational science scholars have produced a large amount of research that can be organized under the broad heading of social skills. Yet, three key issues in the literature are hampering progress: (1) the lack of a well-accepted articulation of the social skills phenomenon, what it is and what it is not; (2) conceptual redundancy and conflation among the set of social skills-related concepts (e.g., individual differences, skills, behavior, evaluations, etc.), and (3) full consideration of the importance of social behavior in understanding social skills. We propose solutions for understanding social skills that begin to resolve these issues and help strengthen future empirical research. Specifically, we present two distinct, but related, conceptualizations of social skills: social skills enactment and social skills reputation. We then offer a theoretically grounded perspective, the Social Skills Framework, which incorporates these conceptualizations of social skills, provides a structure into which existing social skills concepts can be integrated and evaluated for conceptual clarity, and centers social behavior. After describing the framework, we offer a research agenda that focuses on refining the framework and investigating key issues related to the two conceptualizations of social skills.