Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence, known as EI, has been widely recognized by the academic community in the last two decades. It was first introduced by Salovey and Mayer in 1990 and developed to a complete theory by Goleman in 1995 (Locke 2005). According to George (2000, pp.1033-4), the concept of emotional intelligence could be defined as the follows: ‘emotional intelligence taps into the extent to which people’s cognitive capabilities are informed by emotions and the extent to which emotions are cognitively managed’. Emotional intelligence has evolved from a psychological concept into different realms and generated a number of valuable applications, especially in leadership. This essay will examine the necessity of emotional intelligence for managers to achieve successful management in the workplace. It will focus on three aspects which include manager’s high EI might lead to high productivity, EI has limited practical value in certain industry, and EI might not be accepted as a valid concept.

Firstly, managers may need high EI to maintain a steady emotion climate in order to achieve efficiency. For the purpose of understanding the importance of EI for manager, the objectives of manager should be stated ahead. Locke suggests that the primary objective of an organization is to achieve goals, as for manager, the leader of an organization, should be able to makes plans, lead the members, control the situation and organize the whole lot to attain goals. As stated above, the manager has four basic tasks which all involve EI. Ashkanasy and Daus (2002) demonstrate that in certain industries, especially in the service industry, after a long time working employees might encounter in negative emotions such as frustration, anger and resentment. This feeling may have a negative effect on the employee’s performance, additionally one’s emotions might also influence others so that it affect the entire emotion climate which in all probability may result in a deduction of efficient. Therefore, it requires manager has the ability to identify the emotion climate, in other words “managers need to raise their awareness”. Although it requires skills to perceive the situation, trying to intervene and prevent is the difficult part which is why EI plays a significant role in the management. Ashkanasy and Daus also propose that a successful manager should be able to understand how his employees feel and also has the ability to motivate them in order to achieve the common goal. Another research did by Gunsel and Acikgoz (2011) indicate that there is a positive relationship between emotional intelligence and project output. This result also implies that with a higher EI then there may be a better chance that the manager might perform better. Although it seems that EI does play a significant role in the workplace, there are certain shortcomings about using emotional intelligence to determine the performance of a manager.