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The MBA’s shift towards leadership and soft skills is sensible but thinly evidenced in South Africa

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Introduction

The MBA is increasingly expected to produce leaders and not only analysts. Leadership, communication and the ability to work with people make up the soft side of management, and they seem to have been creeping into MBA programmes and into the research students choose to do (Suleman, Nieuwenhuizen and Meyer, 2023; Boshkoska, Sen and Boškoski, 2024). An early piece of evidence comes from a research report at the Wits Business School, in which Thomas (2011) analysed past MBA research records and reported that students’ topics follow issues that are topical in the business world, that topic choice has shifted toward the softer skills of business, and that researchers are moving away from quantitative techniques toward other methodologies. Whether that shift is a sign of maturity or just fashion is the question this paper asks.

The argument is that the move toward leadership and soft skills is defensible, but that the South African evidence behind it is thinner than the confidence of the trend suggests. Employers and job advertisements do appear to value interpersonal skills (Boshkoska, Sen and Boškoski, 2024; Ferreira, Robertson and Pitt, 2023). Yet leadership development is routinely offered without much evaluation (Leroy et al., 2022), South African stakeholders also ask for technical skills (Suleman, Nieuwenhuizen and Meyer, 2023), and a topic that is popular is not necessarily a topic that addresses a strategic problem a manager would recognise.

The paper begins with what the Wits trend study can and cannot tell us. It then looks at the case for the soft turn (Shantz et al., 2023), at the weaknesses in the evidence for leadership development (Leroy et al., 2022), and at the South African pressure to keep technical and strategic content in the degree (Suleman, Meyer and Nieuwenhuizen, 2023). It ends with what a more defensible approach to leadership and soft skills in the MBA would look like (Mbokota and Reid, 2022).

What the Wits trend study shows and what it cannot

The Thomas (2011) study appears to be the closest thing to a direct record of how MBA research topics at a South African school have moved. Its abstract reports a quantitative analysis of past MBA research records, first of the topics students chose and then of the methodology each record used. It finds that topics track current issues in the business world, that choice has moved toward softer skills, and that researchers are shifting from quantitative techniques to other approaches. The author then recommends that management education institutions, curriculum designers and MBA researchers use these trends to shape what programmes teach. I could read only the abstract of this research report, so the detail behind those findings, including the years covered, is not something I can describe (Thomas, 2011).

Three limits follow from that. It is a single school, and it is a research report written for an MBA and not a peer-reviewed article (Thomas, 2011). It is also now well over a decade old, which matters because what counted as a topical issue around 2010 may not be what managers worry about now (Suleman, Nieuwenhuizen and Meyer, 2023). And its central finding, that topics follow what is topical, says something quite different from a claim that topics match the problems managers say they face. The abstract is silent on that point. A topic can be fashionable and still miss the issue that keeps a chief executive awake (Thomas, 2011; Suleman, Meyer and Nieuwenhuizen, 2023).

The reason the question matters is practical. The study opens from the observation that demand for MBA holders is rising generally and rising more strongly for business leadership in South Africa and across the continent, with the final-year research report as the standard capstone (Thomas, 2011). If topic choice mostly mirrors what is topical, then the soft turn is partly a mirror of whatever employers, the business press and lecturers are talking about at the time. Responsiveness of that kind is not a fault. A mirror cannot also be a test, though, and nobody can tell from a count of topics whether leadership studies are tackling the strategic issues organisations face or simply the ones that are easiest to write about (Thomas, 2011; Suleman, Meyer and Nieuwenhuizen, 2023).

Studies from elsewhere hint that the relevance worry travels. Alalawneh and Alkhatib (2023) analysed 283 MBA theses produced in Jordan between 1996 and 2018, with particular attention to operations and information systems. They report a number of critical problems in business research that affect both its applicability and its quality, and that limit what it contributes in academic and practical terms. That is a different country and a different focus, so I would not transplant the conclusion to South Africa. It is still a useful reminder that counting what MBA students write about is only a first step, because the harder question is whether the writing is any use to a manager (Alalawneh and Alkhatib, 2023).

There is a more positive reading of the MBA research project, and it matters for the soft skills argument. Nzekwe-Excel (2022) studied the experiences of MBA students at a UK institution who had taken a business research module and found that, although students felt stretched, they developed a range of workplace skills while doing their projects, and that practical implications and steady supervisor support helped them finish. In other words the research report itself can be a place where the soft skills get built, which is a reason to take its topic seriously (Nzekwe-Excel, 2022; Thomas, 2011).

The methods half of the Thomas (2011) finding deserves its own look. A move away from quantitative techniques could mean healthier variety, because questions about coaching, trust or identity do not reduce neatly to a survey scale. It could also mean something less comfortable, namely that students avoid statistics. The studies in this paper show that the best evidence uses both. Mbokota and Reid (2022) combined a before-and-after feedback instrument with interviews, and Boshkoska, Sen and Boškoski (2024) used a probabilistic topic model on thousands of job postings to say something about people skills. Soft topics do not require soft methods, and a school that took the Wits trend as permission to teach less quantitative reasoning would be misreading it (Thomas, 2011; Nzekwe-Excel, 2022).

The case for the soft turn

Why would topic choice drift toward the softer side? Part of the answer is that the labour market seems to ask for it, and that skills for MBA-level jobs are hard to pin down in the first place. Boshkoska, Sen and Boškoski (2024) used topic modelling on 6,400 LinkedIn job postings in Pennsylvania, collected over one month in 2023, and identified 28 job functions needing an MBA. They report that communication, collaboration and social skills turned up across many job categories. The authors themselves describe MBA-level skills as far more nebulous than those of engineering, medicine or law, ranging from interpersonal and leadership skills through business skills to specific technical ones. That is American data from a single state, which is a long way from a Johannesburg boardroom, but it fits the idea that interpersonal ability is not a niche requirement (Boshkoska, Sen and Boškoski, 2024; Ferreira, Robertson and Pitt, 2023).

Ferreira, Robertson and Pitt (2023) point in the same direction from a narrower base. Collecting data in 2019 and again in 2020 in the digital marketing and advertising industry, they found a renewed importance placed on soft skills after the COVID-19 pandemic, with remote working turning soft skills into a training priority for new employees. They also found hard skill gaps in data analytics, marketing automation and user experience. The industry is specific and the sample is not an MBA population, so the study cannot speak for every sector. What it does show is that employers can want both kinds of skill at once (Ferreira, Robertson and Pitt, 2023; Boshkoska, Sen and Boškoski, 2024).

There is also a moral and strategic argument for the soft turn. Shantz et al. (2023) audited how MBA programmes deal with grand challenges and argue that leaders need to take several perspectives into account, look ahead and stay morally aware. They found that little attention is paid to preparing students for such challenges, and they identified three barriers that may stop educators from teaching these competencies. For South Africa, where inequality, energy supply and public trust are daily management problems, the point is hard to dismiss. I would add that soft skills are not a lightweight alternative to rigour, since judgement under ethical pressure is difficult to teach and harder to assess (Shantz et al., 2023; Suleman, Meyer and Nieuwenhuizen, 2023).

Where the evidence on leadership development is weak

Leadership is the centrepiece of the soft turn, and this is where the evidence is least comfortable. Leroy et al. (2022) interviewed 60 academic directors of leadership centres at top business schools. They found that the programmes schools select do not always match scientific recommendations, and that schools do not always carry out high-quality evaluations of those programmes. The authors link the gap to a missing identity as an evidence-based leader developer, which they say makes it hard for academics to practise what they preach. That is an unflattering finding for institutions that teach evidence-based management, and the interviews were with directors at top business schools, which makes it harder to assume the problem lies only with weaker institutions (Leroy et al., 2022; Shantz et al., 2023).

South African work shows both the promise and the limits. Mbokota and Reid (2022) studied a business school leadership development programme that combined classroom facilitation with group coaching for South African women managers. Using a 360-degree feedback instrument before and after the programme, plus in-depth interviews, they found that participants’ leadership effectiveness changed over the programme. Coaching seemed to strengthen personal competence, such as self-awareness and self-confidence, and social competence, such as understanding others and empowering them, and a psychologically safe setting helped. This is a stronger design than a satisfaction survey, since it measured something before and after. Still, it covers one programme and one group of women managers, so it says little about whether the same approach would work in a general MBA cohort (Mbokota and Reid, 2022; Leroy et al., 2022).

A fair assessment also has to allow that criticism of the MBA may sometimes be overdone. Amblee, Ertl and Dhayanithy (2023) note the long-running complaint that MBA graduates lack the skills managers need and that the curriculum is to blame. Their analysis of United States programmes found the required curriculum to be more closely aligned with managerial competency benchmarks than previously believed, particularly when competencies are delivered across several courses. The point for this paper is that, as far as I could find, neither the critics nor the defenders of the soft turn have much South African data to argue with (Amblee, Ertl and Dhayanithy, 2023; Suleman, Nieuwenhuizen and Meyer, 2023).

Technical content, relevance and the South African setting

The risk in a soft turn is that it crowds out something managers also say they need. Suleman, Nieuwenhuizen and Meyer (2023) interviewed stakeholders in the South African business school ecosystem about how well MBA programmes prepare leaders for the fourth industrial revolution. They report that programmes need to strengthen their focus on technology-linked technical skills, which the authors describe as a key driver shaping the business environment. The MBA, they note, has been criticised for its relevance for years. So the stakeholders they spoke to were asking for more of the hard side, not less, at least in this respect (Suleman, Nieuwenhuizen and Meyer, 2023).

A second study by the same group, based on 30 in-depth interviews, proposes a nexus of relevance for South African business schools. If a school acts within the overlap of industry, society and government, the authors suggest, it will stay relevant to its main stakeholders (Suleman, Meyer and Nieuwenhuizen, 2023). The model is conceptual, and it is built from interviews, so it describes perceptions more than outcomes. But it carries a useful implication for research topics. A topic is relevant when someone in industry, government or the community would recognise the problem it addresses, and a fashion for leadership studies does not guarantee that (Suleman, Meyer and Nieuwenhuizen, 2023; Thomas, 2011).

Put these two together with the Pennsylvania and advertising studies and the picture is of employers who want people skills and technical skills at the same time (Ferreira, Robertson and Pitt, 2023; Boshkoska, Sen and Boškoski, 2024). The shift in research toward softer topics and away from quantitative methods, if it continued after 2011, would then leave a gap in just the area South African stakeholders flag. I say if, because nothing I have read measures the trend after the Thomas study, and that absence is itself part of the argument (Thomas, 2011; Suleman, Nieuwenhuizen and Meyer, 2023).

What a defensible approach would look like

A defensible version of the soft turn would start by treating leadership and soft skills as things that can be tested. The Mbokota and Reid (2022) design, with a 360-degree measure before and after, is a workable model, and Leroy et al. (2022) show why schools should adopt it. Programmes would state what change they expect in observable behaviour and then check whether it happened, which Leroy et al. (2022) suggest does not always occur. None of that is expensive in principle, though it does take willingness to publish disappointing results.

The research report could then do more of the work. If students were asked to anchor their topic in a strategic problem that an employer, a department or a community organisation had named, the question of relevance would be answered at the proposal stage and not after the fact (Suleman, Meyer and Nieuwenhuizen, 2023; Nzekwe-Excel, 2022). Methods training would stay in the degree, because a soft topic still needs sound evidence, and a move away from quantitative techniques is a loss if it means fewer graduates who can test a claim with numbers. Schools might also track the topics students choose year by year, as Thomas (2011) did once, and set them against what managers report. Alalawneh and Alkhatib (2023) show that this kind of audit of theses is feasible.

Conclusion

The shift toward leadership and soft skills in MBA research and teaching has support. Job postings, post-pandemic employer behaviour and arguments about grand challenges all point to the importance of people skills (Boshkoska, Sen and Boškoski, 2024; Ferreira, Robertson and Pitt, 2023; Shantz et al., 2023). What is missing is proof that the leadership content works, and a clear link between popular topics and the strategic problems managers face (Leroy et al., 2022; Thomas, 2011).

My view is that the soft turn should continue, but that it needs to be earned with evidence and not left to fashion (Leroy et al., 2022; Alalawneh and Alkhatib, 2023). South African stakeholders still want technical and technology skills, the best local study of leadership development rests on one programme, and the Wits trend study that started this discussion is a single school’s record from 2011 (Suleman, Nieuwenhuizen and Meyer, 2023; Mbokota and Reid, 2022; Thomas, 2011). A school that measured outcomes and tied research topics to named problems would be in a much stronger position to say that its graduates lead better, and not just that they write about leadership more.

Reference list

Alalawneh, A.A.F. and Alkhatib, S.F.S. (2023) Business research in developing economies: evidential MBA theses approach – case of Jordan. Jordan Journal of Business Administration, 19(4). doi:https://doi.org/10.35516/jjba.v19i4.1432

Amblee, N., Ertl, H. and Dhayanithy, D. (2023) A more relevant MBA: the role of across-the-curriculum delivery of intercompetency coursework in aligning the required curriculum with required managerial competencies. Journal of Management Education, 47(2), pp. 204-238. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/10525629221121700

Boshkoska, B.M., Sen, S. and Boškoski, P. (2024) A market driven identification of current and emerging skills requiring an MBA degree: a topic modelling approach. Journal of Decision Systems, 33(sup1), article 2348932. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/12460125.2024.2348932

Ferreira, C., Robertson, J. and Pitt, L. (2023) Business (un)usual: critical skills for the next normal. Thunderbird International Business Review, 65(1), pp. 39-47. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/tie.22276

Leroy, H.L., Anisman-Razin, M., Avolio, B.J. et al. (2022) Walking our evidence-based talk: the case of leadership development in business schools. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 29(1), pp. 5-32. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518211062563

Mbokota, G. and Reid, A. (2022) The role of group coaching in developing leadership effectiveness in a business school leadership development programme. South African Journal of Business Management, 53(1), article a3105. doi:https://doi.org/10.4102/sajbm.v53i1.3105

Nzekwe-Excel, C. (2022) A qualitative study on the experiences and challenges of MBA students’ engagement with a business research methods module. Journal of Work-Applied Management, 14(1), pp. 46-62. doi:https://doi.org/10.1108/jwam-08-2020-0040

Shantz, A., Sayer, M., Byrne, J. and Dempsey-Brench, K. (2023) Grand challenges and the MBA. Journal of Management Education, 47(3), pp. 292-323. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/10525629231154891

Suleman, A., Meyer, N. and Nieuwenhuizen, C. (2023) Exploring the nexus of relevance for South African business schools in the 4th industrial revolution. Journal of Management and Business Education, 6(3), pp. 257-288. doi:https://doi.org/10.35564/jmbe.2023.0014

Suleman, A., Nieuwenhuizen, C. and Meyer, N. (2023) An analysis of the efficacy of South African MBA programmes in relation to the 4th industrial revolution. Southern African Business Review, 27. doi:https://doi.org/10.25159/1998-8125/14101

Thomas, S.M. (2011) Trends in MBA research topics. MBA research report, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10539/10188 (Accessed: 18 October 2026).