Effective Leadership - can Soft Skills Contribute to the Effectiveness of an Organization?

Our paper deals with the relationship between "soft factors" in management and organization effectiveness. We have chosen the construct of organizational identity as a comprehensive concept conceived as the form of sharing of fundamental values, which allows the organization to determine itself vis-a-vis others and to stay one's own. Organizational identity represents the output of processes of staff identification with the organization and thus we presume that it is closely related to leadership styles, organizational atmosphere, forms of communication and other organizational processes aimed at human resources management. The organizational identity itself is described by the means of attributes referring to relations of the organization to outer and inner stakeholders and carrying the potential to generate different social values (individualistic, group and collective orientation) and by the rate of their sharing. There are other factors included in our analyses, namely the organization's environment, structure, culture and its strategy. Effectiveness is described as an aggregate of selected economic indicators. Most research on this topic has a qualitative character, which does not allow capturing the nature of complex relations among the elements and processes in organizations. We presume that the factors in view interact, which leads us to the choice of finding a methodology which would respect this fact and allow us to identify the subset of those factors, the concurrence of which carries the greatest weight for organizational effectiveness. In this paper, the results of pilot research in selected organizations in the Czech Republic are discussed. One discussed method of analysis is the method of feature selection (also known as variable or attribute selection). It is the process of selecting a subset of relevant features for use in model construction. A feature selection algorithm can be viewed as a search technique for proposing feature subsets, by means of which those subsets are assessed, enabling us to recognize key factors in an organization in relationship to its efficiency.