International concerns about depletion of natural capital have led to a worldwide focus on sustainability. Sustainable development requires careful balancing of social, natural, and financial recourses and as one of the greatest users of natural and human recourses, organizations all over the world are being encouraged or forced, to take up their responsibility and invest in sustainable development. But what implications does this responsibility have for professionals working in this environment? Professionals need to be equipped with (new) skills and competencies that allow them to contribute actively to sustainable development and benefit from emerging new forms of socialization.

Therefore, a reasonable question is, which skills or competencies should sustainability-professionals acquire to operate effectively? Chalkley (2006) suggested that sustainability-professionals should not only know about sustainable issues, they should also have the skills to act sustainably if they wish and, furthermore, they should have the personal and emotional attributes that require them to behave sustainably. But the list should not be a separate ‘laundry’ list of knowledge, skills, and attitudes (and/or attributes) as is done in one-dimensional frameworks of competence (e.g., Segalas, Ferrer-Balas, Svanstrom, Lundqvist and Mulder, 2009), because these detailed lists cannot provide guidelines for curriculum/program development (Barnett, 1994). Indeed, one-dimensional perspectives are given way to multi-dimensional approaches of competence, which considers knowledge, skills, and attitudes as dimensions of competence (Le Deist & Winterton, 2005). Competence in this respect is defined as an integrated performance-oriented capability of a person to reach specific achievements, in which ‘integrated’ refers to a cohesive complex of knowledge, skills, and attitude and the integration with the context in which successful performance has to take place (Mulder, 2011). Le Deist and Winterton’s (2005) holistic approach of understanding the combination of cognitive-, functional-, social-, and meta-competences necessary for a profession could be useful in determining which competencies sustainability-professionals need to perform effectively, as this perspective prevents the risk of atomization (i.e., one-dimensional perspective).

Several scholars (especially in the field of higher education) have addressed the importance/relevance of sustainability-related competencies. For example Nijhof et al., 2005 studied competence development from a managerial perspective and formulated a six-step model for developing collective corporate social responsibility-related competencies. Willard et al. (2010) identified hard- (e.g., strategic planning) and soft-competencies (e.g., communication skills) as being important for successful performance of sustainability-professionals. However, despite scholar’s interest in this subject, a comprehensive list of individual sustainability-related competencies is still lacking. Moreover, it is also unclear which of the competencies mentioned by scholars are derived through empirical research. Therefore, a comprehensive list of (empirical underpinned) sustainability-related competencies could be very useful; it could guide schools and corporations in selecting personnel and (learning) activities for curriculum development or enhancement of organizational sustainability-performance. The current study attempts to constructs such a list by answering the following research questions:

1. Which individual competencies associated with organization's sustainability-performance are mentioned in scientific studies? (RQ1)
2. What is the nature of these statements (anecdotal, monographic statement, empirical review, or single study empirical work); i.e., are these statements based on empirical studies? (RQ2)

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