LEADERSHIP

Leadership

Leadership

Introduction

By all counts, leadership ranks among the most researched and debated topics in the organizational sciences. Effective management of organizations and human resources is facing enormous challenges.

According to Hogan & Kaiser (2004), Leadership is about the performance of teams, groups, and organizations. Good leadership promotes effective team and group performance, which in turn enhances the well being of the incumbents; bad leadership degrades the quality of life for everyone associated with it. Hogan and Kaiser (2004) also state that personality predicts leadership - who we are, is how we lead.

Existing studies detail what leaders are like, what they do, and how they make decisions. With the exception of literature relating to charisma, there has been a relative neglect in the area of the effects of leaders' feelings on their moods and emotions and, more generally, the role of emotions in the leadership process (Conger & Kanungo, 1998). Leadership theory and research has not adequately considered how leaders' moods and emotions influence their effectiveness of leaders.

Two preliminary studies study suggested that leaders' feelings may play an important role in leadership. George and Bettenhausen (1990), discovered that the extent to which leaders of existing work groups experienced positive moods was positively related to levels of positive social behavior performed by group members and negatively related to group turnover rates. In another study, George (1995), later found that work groups provided higher quality customer service than groups led by managers who did not tend to experience positive moods at work.

The growing body of literature exploring the role of moods and emotions in human and organizational affairs suggests that, rather than being simply and additional factor to consider, feelings play a much more central role in the leadership process (George, 2008). In the modern times, it has been believed that the success of an organization often lies on the effectiveness of the leader. Thus, an effective leader is someone that is high on emotional intelligence. Weinberger (2009) through some researchers and popular writings identified emotional intelligence (EI) as the critical element that is required to achieve effective leadership. The problem that remains today is there is a gap between the emotional intelligence and leadership (Weinberger, 2009).

Studies have shown that emotional intelligence impacts a leader's ability to be effective (Goleman, 1998). Three of the most important aspects of emotional intelligence for a leader's ability to make effective decisions are self-awareness, communication and influence, and commitment and integrity. Managers who do not develop their emotional intelligence have difficulty in building good relationship with peers, subordinates, superiors and clients (Goleman, 1998).

This paper will create an analysis of the relationship of the skills of emotional intelligence to the leadership ability of a leader in an organization.

Defining Emotional Intelligence

The topic of emotional intelligence and its impact on organizations and its leaders grew largely through the popular publications of Goleman's (1995) book titled Emotional Intelligence and his subsequent book Working with Emotional Intelligence (Goleman, 1998). The interest in emotional intelligence continues ...