This article re-visits the relationship between teacher beliefs and teaching behaviours and analyses factors influencing the translation of teacher beliefs into teaching behaviours using the case of developing generic skills for university students. Through interviews with 16 teachers of skills subjects and 25 teachers of specialised subjects of the Business Administration programs in six different Vietnamese universities, it was shown that there was an indirect relationship between teacher beliefs and their teaching behaviours. The analysis showed that institutional leadership and teachers' personal motivation could strongly influence the translation of their beliefs into actual teaching behaviours. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.