In 21 st Century, organizations need to be managed with specific competencies due to the changing and complex world in which they are developing their activities. Managerial competencies have been defined as a set of motivations, personal, traits, abilities, knowledge and values necessary to improve management performance and is a branch of a larger group of individual competencies. So, identifying these managerial competencies becomes a valuable source for achieving competitive advantages in these organizations.The aim of this paper is to carry out a concise "state of the art" review of a managerial competencies research domain, in particular, how scholars approached this field of study, what aspects of managerial competencies were studied, which areas and sectors were chosen and which countries scholars focused their research on, how that research was defined, which methodologies were used, which target population was chosen to do the research, how many individuals took part in the process of obtaining data and finally what conclusions were reached. This study identifies and evaluates the literature on managerial competencies published in journals included in the Social Sciences Citation Index of the Web of Science in order to identify what (topics), when (evolution over time), where (areas, countries, regions), by whom (principal authors and journals) and how (research types and methodologies) it has been researched.Reviewing the content of this systematic study allows a contemporary and comprehensive overview of this field as such and a methodological contribution to run a multi-variate analysis of the different aspects related to managerial competencies. This study identifies cross-disciplinary research perspectives in the field today. Some gaps in the research are identified and the main contribution of this paper is to determine how conclusions can be reached about possible future research in this field to supplement, update and extend the result obtained to date.

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