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Emotions and Leadership Emotions and leadership: The role of emotional intelligence ABSTRACT This paper suggests that feelings (moods and emotions) play a central role in the leadership process. More specifically, it is proposed that emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage moods and emotions in the self and others, contributes to effective leadership in organizations. Four major aspects of emotional intelligence, the appraisal and expression of emotion, the use of emotion to enhance cognitive processes and decision making, knowledge about emotions, and management of emotions, are described. Then, I propose how emotional intelligence contributes to effective leadership by focusing on five essential elements of leader effectiveness: development of collective goals and objectives; instilling in others an appreciation of the importance of work activities; generating and maintaining enthusiasm, confidence, optimism, cooperation, and trust encouraging flexibility in decision making and change; and establishing and maintaining a meaningful identity for an organization. KEYWORDS affect * emotion * emotional intelligence * leadership * mood By all counts, leadership ranks among the most researched and debated topics in the organizational sciences. A wide diversity of approaches to leadership has been proposed -- researchers have analyzed what leaders are like, what they do, how they motivate their followers, how their styles interact with situational conditions, and how they can make major changes in their organizations, for example (for reviews of the leadership literature see Bass, 1990; Fiedler & House, 1994; Yukl, 1998; Yukl & Van Fleet, 1992). Researchers have also explored when leadership might not be important and some leadership experts have proposed that leadership is more a creation in the minds of followers than a characteristic of those who occupy leadership roles (e.g. Meindl, 1990). While we have learned much about leadership from this diversity of approaches, it still remains somewhat of an enigma. While research has been conducted which supports (and sometimes fails to support) currently popular theories, and these theories have increased our understanding of leadership, how and why leaders have (or fail to have) positive influences on their followers and organizations is still a compelling question for leadership researchers. While existing studies detail what leaders are like, what they do, and how they make decisions, the effects of leaders' feelings or their moods and emotions and, more generally, the role of emotions in the leadership process, are often not explicitly considered in the leadership literature, with the notable exception of work on charisma (e.g. Conger & Kanungo, 1998; Lindholm, 1990). This relative neglect is not surprising as the organizational literature has been dominated by a cognitive orientation (Ilgen & Klein, 1989), with feelings being ignored or being seen as something that gets in the way of rationality and effective decision making (Albrow, 1992). Just as motivation theory and research have ignored how workers' moods and emotions influence their choice of work activities, levels of effort, and levels of persistence in the face of obstacles (George & Brief, 1996), leadership theory and research have not adequately considered how leaders' moods and emotions influence their effectiveness as leaders. Tw o preliminary studies suggest that leaders' feelings may play an important role in leadership. George and Bettenhausen (1990) found that the extent to which leaders of existing work groups experienced positive moods was positively related to levels of prosocial behavior performed by group members and negatively related to group turnover rates. George (1995) found that work groups led by sales managers who tended to experience positive moods at work provided higher quality customer service than groups led by managers who did not tend to experience positive moods at work. While these two studies help to fill a gap in the leadership literature, in and of themselves, they do not illuminate the role of moods and emotions in the leadership process per se but rather suggest that feelings may be an important factor to consider. The growing body of literature exploring the role of moods and emotions in human and organizational affairs (e.g. Fineman, 1993; Forgas, 1995) suggests that, rather than being simply an additional factor to consider, feelings play a much more central role in the leadership process. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework describing what that role might be. First, however, it is useful to sample the literature and research findings attesting to the central role of feelings in human affairs.
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