Do managers need emotional intelligence to manage successfully in the workplace?
Emotional intelligence (EI) is a relatively new topic to general public in the workplace management and it is a growing area of behavioural research, the business journal such as Fortune and Harvard Business Review also have discussed the issues of emotional intelligence for the leaders. [Neal M. Ashkanasy and Catherine S. Daus]. These Journals make the commercial groups and the scientific parts have the interest to developing further on emotional intelligence. From the research and these study articles, I strongly believe that managers need emotional intelligence to manage successfully in the work place.
“Despite the important role attributed to a wide array of emotional competencies in the workplace, there is currently only a modicum of research supporting the meaning role attributed to Emotional intelligence in determining occupational success.”[Jennifer M.George, Human Relations 2000 53:1027] Emotional intelligence will benefit people in the ways to control other people’s feeling, such as when the group is in a negative mood, the leader need to enthuse the mood, to make the group member participate in the activity again, or sometimes they need to set the goal for the team, to encourage them, create trust, identity and collaboration within the team members. Therefore, emotional intelligence is the potential skill for managers to manage their performance successfully.
Firstly, emotional intelligence is more important than other talent for a successful manager. The successes of managers are consisting of 80% of emotional intelligence and other 20% of other talent. [Caruso,D,R & Salovey,P] Here is the case, there is a manager called Peter Jordan, he groups a team of high emotional intelligence members without any experienced skills, to compete with another group which contains many trained, experienced employees but with low- emotional intelligence. The result show Peter’s group performs as well as the other team, this is completely reveals the importance of emotional intelligence in a team work.
Emotional intelligence can affect our decision making through understand others’, and this will lead the team’s process more effectively. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to recognize emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively adjust emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth [Mayer & Salovey, 1997:5]. For a leader, emotional intelligence is also a necessary skill. General, there are two types of manager exist in the workplace. One is the managers with high IQ and also high emotional intelligence. This kind of manager always has the excellent result in any case, they are supported by many followers, and they have built trust and maintain the high positive mood in their group. The managers have high interpersonal skill which can discuss and combine the opinions from the members, then lead the team to make the best decision effectively. Second type of mangers is in high IQ but low in emotional intelligence and the outcome from them will not be as good as the first type. They can get the best solution for the challenges within their work, only as an individual performance. With low emotional intelligence, they do not have the idea how to cooperate with others, they are lack of the ability of leadership which means to understand and inspire others’ feeling, they even cannot deal with the situation when there is conflict during the work process. Thus, most of the second type managers only can performs as an individual employee in the company; they cannot act as an excellent team leader. Emotional intelligence is distinct from, but positively related to other intelligence. [ Neal M. Ashkanasy] as a