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The purpose of this paper is to contribute further insights into how organizations can diagnose if they have middle managers who are able to reach their objectives, to be outstanding in the competitive environment that they belong to, that is to give new roles and initiatives, using a qualitative approach.

In this management research, the critical incident technique through semi‐structured interviews is used to identify the critical job requirements which are indicated through the difference between doing the job correctly and doing it incorrectly or efficiently and inefficiently. The events of critical incidents could be coded for various characteristics or competences, which seem to be relevant to the particular middle managers' job. After that, they were grouped into five teams for the easiest assessment and the annotation of the findings, i.e. competences directed on management job, on integrity, on personal effectiveness and performance, on people and on specialized knowledge.

Qualitative evidence was found for managerial competences, values and the way these competences are related to effectiveness and job satisfaction.

Future research should explore how these results can be linked to contextual elements and to business performance.

This study contributes to increased managerial competence awareness, which is important for intrapersonal development and interpersonal cooperation.

This is one of a few studies that have centered on the middle managers only of the organizational chart and compared their different skills, needs and requests. It provides relevant insights into a thorough understanding of middle managers' competences, which are 21 in total. These 21 areas are divided into five main categories/clusters.

The purpose of this paper is to address the challenge in evaluating China's overseas management training and development (MTD) in cross‐cultural settings. It examines the evaluation practice of China's overseas MTD interventions and explores a comprehensive approach to the MTD evaluation.

This study collected both quantitative and qualitative data from 526 major stakeholders involved in China's overseas MTD. A mix method approach is used to explore the perspectives of different stakeholders.

The respondents from different stakeholder groups perceived purposes of evaluation and problems conducting evaluation differently. The perceived evaluation criteria and approaches by individual group were also focused differently. The current evaluation system was based on segmented information collection and little joint effort was found in the MTD evaluation. The judgement on the value of China's overseas MTD is culturally sensitive due to the diversity of stakeholders from different cultural backgrounds. A new framework is proposed to address the evaluation challenge.

This study is limited to evaluating China's MTD between China and the UK. The evaluation framework is based on complex involvement of multiple stakeholders in an international setting. It may not be applicable to situations where only two parties are involved in training.

The proposed stakeholder‐based evaluation framework may be used for other skill‐based training and development programs involving multiple stakeholders in the international arena.

This paper contributes to the HRM evaluation literature by focusing on a unique evaluation setting and proposes a framework to evaluate a complex international MTD initiative by the Chinese Government.