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Skyline Business School |
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Skyline Business School |
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Issue:14
Leadership and Emotional Intelligence - The
Connection
Leaders today need to manage the moods of their organization. The most successful and
accomplished leaders do this by a blend of psychological abilities, called emotional
intelligence. Self awareness, self regulation, empathy, self-motivation and ability to
motivate others, read theirs and others emotions, while gauging the entire organisation's
emotional state are the few essential parameters by which we can describe emotionally
intelligent leaders.
Can one learn such qualities through a lifetime or are they inborn?
Research on this topic suggests that both nature and nurture feed emotional intelligence.
Part of it comes from the genes, part of it is experiential, and part can be learnt by
training and education.
Relationship between leadership qualities and emotional intelligence
can be defined by the following:
· Being realistic
· Continuos learning
· Building pathways
· Self-motivation
· Training and mentoring the gifted
· Seek frank feedback
· Sniff out signals
· Gauge self-awareness
· Let your guard down
· Engage your demons
· Watch your culture
· Find your voice
· Know the score
· Keep it honest
· Go for the gemba
· Balance the load
Challenges to leadership, applying emotional intelligence and
inspire ordinary people to do extraordinary things:
· Start with the truth
· Appeal to greatness
· Make them proud
· Stick to your values
· Be a broken record
· Build trust
· Encourage risk
· Care for the little guy
· Ground without grinding
· Leap first, ask later
Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee (2002) present a case for EI being a critical component for
leadership effectiveness, particularly when leaders deal with teams.
Emotionally intelligent leaders serve as a benefit to teams in two
ways. Leaders motivate teams to work together towards team goals. Leaders also serve as a
transformational influence over team members. In this manner, leaders challenge the
members of the team to work together toward increasing team effectiveness and performance,
facilitate team member interaction dynamic, build interpersonal trust and inspire team
members to implement the articulated vision.
Basic Abilities of Emotionally Intelligent Leaders
George (2000) lists four aspects of EI, which provide leaders the ability to
motivate and transform team members.
The first is the ability to accurately appraise others'
emotions as well as effectively portray personal emotion. How does
this help?
This ability is related to individual-level focus on self-awareness. Awareness of one's
own and others' emotional states allows individuals to establish and maintain supportive
relationships with others.
The second aspect states that a leader must have a thorough
knowledge about emotions, meaning the leader is able to predict emotional reactions in
various scenarios. For example, emotionally intelligent leaders expect associates to be of
a good cheer when they are given a raise, or to suffer dissatisfaction and anxiety when
given a bad performance appraisal. This knowledge aids the leader in the activity of
emotion regulation and management of team members.
The third aspect involves the use of emotion whereby
emotionally intelligent leaders recognize emotions are useful in the influence of the
behavior and cognition of others. Effective emotional regulation has
a positive effect on performance and general interactions: facilitating innovative
thinking, contributing to a supportive environment, etc.
George identified the management of emotions as the fourth aspect.
The management of emotions facet brings the three previous aspects to be used in
ultimately directing one's own as well as others' interaction processes and emotional
responses. It is the leader's job to manage emotions towards the
creation of more effective teams. Goleman (1995) has identified several aspects of
EI that are important to effective relationship management, such as self-awareness,
self-motivation, empathy and emotional management.
In order to be a benefit to the team, leaders must be able to establish strong emotional
relationships with team members.
The Motivational Leader
Sosik and Megerian (1999) state that EI has an influence on self-motivation.
Emotionally intelligent who are self-motivated feel more secure in their ability to
control and influence life events. Bestowed with personal efficacy, they are motivated to
face situations with confidence. The positive affect of team leaders attracts and
motivates team members. Positive emotions, such as enthusiasm or cheerfulness, are
considered to be emotionally contagious.
Emotionally intelligent leaders provide an impetus for individuals to collectively
perform. Ashforth and Humphrey (1995) state that the motivation for team members to
perform collectively comes from the leader's use of symbolic
management techniques. These include the use of stories, inspirational speech, and rituals
will effectively arouse individuals in order to inspire them to perform according to team
values and defined goal behaviors.
Channer and Hope (2001) have described transformational leaders as leading through raw
enthusiasm, inspiring rather than ordering or directing, facilitating emotional and
intellectual stimulation, possessing and infecting team players with a strong vision. The
transformational leader's overall charisma, motivational influence, intellectual
stimulation and individualized attention to team members creates an atmosphere of
empowerment.
WICS: A Model of Leadership
Traditional models of leadership have been too narrow. A model that is broader and
encompassing is the WICS model.
Three components of leadership:
· Wisdom
· Intelligence
· Creativity Synthesized
In order to be a highly effective leader, a person requires these three components to work
together (Synthesized). One is not a born leader. Wisdom, Intelligence and Creativity are,
to some extent, forms of developing expertise.
Wisdom: A leader can have all qualities such as leadership
skills, intelligence etc, but still lack an additional quality that, is the most important
quality a leader can have, although a rare commodity. This additional quality is
"Wisdom". A number of philosophical and psychological approaches to wisdom have
emerged. The main approaches can be classified as philosophical, implicit-theories and
developmental approaches. Implicit theoretical approaches to wisdom have in common the
search for an understanding of peoples folk conceptions of what wisdom is.
Intelligence: If the conventional intelligence of a leader is
too much higher than that of the people he or she leads, the leader may fail to connect
with those people and become ineffective.
Intelligence here is not just intelligence in its conventional - narrow sense, but rather
it is in terms of the theory of successful intelligence.
Successful intelligence is defined as the ability in life, given one's conception of
success, within one's socio-cultural cultural environment. Academic and Practical
intelligence are key to good leaders.
Creativity: Creativity refers to skill in generating ideas
and products that are relatively novel, high in quality and appropriate to the task at
hand. It is important for leadership because it is the component whereby one generates the
ideas that others will follow.
Attributes associated with creativity include proclivities to:
· Redefine problems
· Recognize how knowledge can both help and hinder creative thinking
· Take sensible risks
· Surmount obstacles that are placed in one's way
· Believe in one's ability to accomplish the task at hand
· Tolerate ambiguity
Synthesis: The final element in the WICS model is Synthesis.
It deals with the interrelation of elements in the model. The base of WICS is successful
intelligence. A leader needs:
· Creative skills to generate new ideas
· Analytical skills to evaluate whether the ideas are good ones
· Practical skills to implement the ideas
A leader may have creative skills but ends up rarely exercising them because of lack of
creative disposition. Similarly, a leader and/or creative but not wise because of his
unwillingness to use intelligence and creativity for a common good. Thus synthesis is
vital in order to get the best performance out of a leader.
Counter View
Current interest in emotional intelligence has bought with it exaggerated claims.
These "exaggerated" claims are baseless because:
· Are high levels of emotional appraising are necessary or detrimental for leadership
effectiveness?
· Is the ability to gauge emotions part of normal psychological functioning culturally
transmitted and simply reflect tacit knowledge?
· Can the effects of emotional intelligence be manifested at group level of analysis?
· Is emotional intelligence a necessary antecedent of charismatic leadership?
· Are emotional outbursts detrimental to leadership effectiveness?
A recent special issue of Leadership Quarterly on emotions
and leadership did not present any robust evidence showing EI to be a predictor of
leadership emergence or effectiveness because many of the studies:
1. Did not control for competing variables (e.g. intelligence, personality)
2. Failed to avoid common method-variance
3. Did not use measures to tap emotional intelligence
4. Used student populations
Three personality factors that are conceptually related with facets of EI
(self-monitoring, agreeableness and need for affiliation) do not support EI being
essential for leadership.
Implicit in previous arguments is that leaders will effect team members homogeneously. For
that to happen, leaders would be required to be socially distant from their followers,
treating them similarly, which is incompatible with those arguments.
Charisma needs vision and moral conviction and not EI
As some would suggest that, emotional intelligence leaders use emotion to create
charismatic effects. Actually the leader follower relation is based on emotional
interactions and the identification of the follower with the leader. For this to occur,
the leader must be able to appraise and reflect the collective wants and aspirations of
the group, identifying a deficiency in the status quo, and then project an emotional,
morally charged vision. In other words, leaders are guided by principles and collective
interests and not by EI.
Conclusions
Nobody questions the importance of emotional intelligence for
leadership. Indeed, studies indicate that your emotional intelligence or emotional
quotient (EQ) accounts for 15% to 45% of your success on the job. (Your IQ, by comparison,
is said to account for less than 6 %.)
Not only do emotionally intelligent leaders evaluate team members' emotional situations in
order to motivate, but they also do so to discourage detrimental interactions.
An important behavior characteristic of a transformational leader has been identified as intellectual stimulation. The emotionally intelligent leader is
able to stimulate team member intellectual and professional development. He allows a
certain amount of individualized focus for each team member, so that each feels important
and necessary to the overall team.
Empowerment of team members can be linked to increased intrinsic value of work team
outcomes, higher job satisfaction, decreased intention to quit and overall increased team
effectiveness and performance.
Possession of emotional intelligence lies at the core of personal charisma demonstrated by
leaders. They read social requirements of situations and know what to do to enlist, direct
and facilitate the dedication of individual effort and team performance.
The emotionally intelligent team offers an environment conducive to creative expression.
Team decision-making ability is dependent upon the degree of team members' emotional
intelligence. The emotional intelligence level of team members is positively related to
team performance.
Bibliography
The report has been made from the following:
· Article: Understanding Leadership
· Author: WCH Prentice
· Article: What Makes A Leader
· Author: Daniel Goleman
· Article: Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Effectiveness and Team Outcomes
· Author: L. Melita Prati, Ceasar Douglas and Gerald R Ferris
· Article: Leading By Feel
· Publication: Harvard Business Review, January 2004
· Article: Moving Mountains - Motivating People
· Publication: Harvard Business Review, January 2003
Summary of Report presented
by Abhimanyu Puri and Rahul Roy, BBA - MAHE, Level 1
Comments and questions: info@skylinecollege.com
URL: http://www.skylinecollege.com
