Abstract

• The objectives of the study are to analyze the effect of hard skills and soft skills on organizational performance and to examine the mediating effect of job performance between skills and organizational performance of SMEs in Myanmar. The different skills of owners of SMEs play an essential role in achieving job performance of owners and organizational performance. Moreover, the mediating role of job performance is an unavoidable requirement to support organizational performance. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with LISREL 8.72 is used to prove the objectives. The target population is 47,642 owners of SMEs in Myanmar. Among them, 440 owners are selected as the respondents by using simple random sampling method. As the final analysis, 215 owners of SMEs are included. The results revealed that soft skills and hard skills have significant direct effects on job performance. Soft skills have significant direct effect on organizational performance. Hard skills have no significant direct effect on organizational performance. Job performance has significant direct effect on organizational performance. Job performance is a full mediating variable for hard skills and partial mediating variable for soft skills. The importance of both skills is seriously emphasized by the owners of SMEs to enhance job performance and also organizational performance.