WORKING WITH EMOTIONAL & SPIRITUAL INTELLIGENCES HUMAN RESOURCE

Working With Emotional & Spiritual Intelligences Human Resource

Working With Emotional & Spiritual Intelligences Human Resource

Introduction

Business leadership attracts a great deal of attention because it is commonly believed that leaders make a large difference on business performance outcomes. The empirical research shows that, in fact, leaders do make a significant difference and that with the wrong leader teams lose, armies are defeated, economies dwindle, and nations fail (Hogan, Curphy, & Hogan, 1994, p. 493). Traditional models relying on IQ or personality traits have shown only limited success in explaining or predicting effective leadership (Sternberg, 1997b). For example, many studies show that traditional IQ, a measure of cognitive intelligence focusing on linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities, explains only a small portion of leader effectiveness (Sternberg, 1997b). Over the last few decades the study of leadership has widened to include different forms of intelligence (Chermers, 2001), including emotional and spiritual intelligences (Mussig, 2003) that may relate to motive- and trait-level qualities that have also come under the rubric of intelligence (McCrae, 2000; Piedmont, 1999).

Analysis

In considering the extent to which spiritual intelligence may contribute to effective business leadership, it is important to first review the new paradigms of business leadership to see how the key tasks of leaders may be enhanced with spiritual intelligence competencies. The second section in this review looks at modern theories of intelligence and the emerging constructs of emotional and spiritual intelligences. As emotional intelligence combines the constructs of emotion and intelligence into a new construct of emotional intelligence (EI), it provides an important analog to spiritual intelligence (SI). Furthermore, as an emerging body of literature has assessed the contribution of EI to leadership, the third section of this review considers the contribution of emotional intelligence to effective business leadership. The fourth section reviews the growing interest in and literature on organizational spirituality, and the fifth section reviews the application and contribution of spirituality to leadership. The sixth section reviews the existing models of spiritual intelligence. The last section reviews and assesses the potential link between spiritual intelligence and effective business leadership on theoretical grounds.

Emotional understanding has been a apprehend phrase in the business world since 1995 when Daniel Goleman published his first book on the subject. The notion of emotional intelligence is not new; even the early developers of IQ checks understood that there was a “non-intellective” component of intelligence that was not being assessed with their assessment. In 1943 David Wechsler composed, “we cannot anticipate to measure total understanding until our checks furthermore include some assess of the non-intellective factors [Wechsler, 1958].” The notion of “non-intellective” intelligence was mostly forgotten until the 1980s when Howard Gardner composed about “multiple intelligences” proposing that there are a number of different constituents to understanding including inter- and intra-personal intelligences.

In 1990, Salovey and Mayer coined the period emotional intelligence and suggested the following delineation: “a kind of communal intelligence, which involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' strong feelings, ...