The knowledge society requires physicians to be creative and innovative in different professional practice settings. This is a challenge to medical teachers, who are required to develop competencies beyond those acquired during their professional training. The purposes of this paper were to assess medical teachers’ academic competencies, and to identify relationships between teachers’ academic competencies and their students’ academic performance. A descriptive-correlational study was carried out, in which it was given two questionnaires to a representative sample of 169 students and 77 teachers at medical schools in Mexico. The responses were recorded on a centesimal scale and analyzed using inferential and descriptive statistics. The domain “Recognize the need to develop teaching competencies” was significantly related to the domains "Help students be creative and innovative" (r=0.64; p<0.01), "Encourage students to work with positive emotions" (r=0.47; p<0.01), “Help students to use complex thinking” (r=0.62; p<0.01), and “Teach students to solve problems by integrating knowledge from different disciplines” (r=0.52; p<0.01). The results suggested that teacher performance is a key factor in the training of physicians under the competencies models.  

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