Emotionally Intelligent Leadership in the Workplace

Abstract

As the modern-day workforce plunges deeper into the 21st century. The demographics, workplace environments, and ethical standpoints are morphing around the viewpoints of today’s working-class citizens. In the past, great leadership was often characterized as someone with a strong backbone, and not afraid to get their hands dirty that their companions can follow behind without question. In today’s modern paradigm, the narrative has shifted away from the traditional leader. A leader today is relatable, passionate, and possesses the emotional intelligence and self-awareness to be inspirational in the workplace. Research into this new characteristic of managerial abilities and positive leadership mentality, has found that organizations prefer people to in leadership roles to have a good sense of their emotional intelligence. They must understand how to have the necessary leadership skillset to be wary on how to handle one’s emotions judiciously.

When peeling back the layers, the main underlying core concepts that shed light into the research and development of this argument is through the emotional motivation, and engagement that is required in today’s workforce. The modern workforce and its employees have transitioned form the traditional leadership traits of stern and strict leadership practices, to a much more relatable, practical, and inspirational leader with the emotional intelligence needed today’s society.

Businesses and organizations have strived to find individuals having the necessary emotional intelligence as a leader. Having the necessary emotional intelligence to inspire, motivate, and lead the modern workforce has become the core value in what organizations look to have in a leadership role in today’s working environment.

Body

Research on emotional intelligence in the work place has become a major focal point in the past few years and has discovered to be a major positive influence in organizational outcomes. Research into the effects and characteristics of leaders with high emotional intelligence, has shown to many organizations as well as business leaders that individuals with high emotional intelligence are more aware of their emotions, and how to manage their emotions. (Kerr, Garvin, Heaton, Boyle, 2006) Emotional Intelligence is shown to demonstrate much more productivity, growth, as well as influence moods in behaviors of their predecessors in a much greater positive tone. (Evans, 2016) The basis and foundation of the cognitive nature of emotional intelligence can be rooted from the health and medicine fields, where demonstrating emotional intelligence can help manage stress, depression, and better due diligence of attention. (Powell, 1997) Emotional intelligence can be looked as the ability of an individual who can utilize the natural mental instincts of thinking, feeling and being able to fuse those mental processes together, (Fuimano, 2004) to where an individual can cognitively make decisions based upon the reactions and emotions of other individuals.

With the recent rise of utilizing emotional intelligence, educational leaders have often wondered the distinct matter of how emotional intelligence in the literature of leadership is often used across a broad range of cultures. In recent studies, it was shown that in many school systems in Asia, the usage of traditional leadership involving strict discipline, no tolerance, and setting high expectations have shown that students in today’s culture have begun to no longer respond to traditional leadership practices. This is in due part to the theory that many traditional cultures have now been influenced by western society due in most part to the rapid expansion of communication, and technology that topple what once was cultural boundaries. (Hui-Wen, Mu-Shang, & Nelson, 2010). Despite the popular belief that old traditions are becoming extinct, it has been observed that empathetic, and supportive leadership has universally become desirable across all cultures leading to a more supportive and emotionally intelligent need for individuals in leadership roles.

The key to having good emotional intelligence is having the necessary self- awareness by understanding one’s own body language and having heighted confidence in vigilance in making confident decisions. (Fuimano, 2004) Research has shown that individuals with high levels of emotional intelligence have focused on making self- awareness a priority, (Maxwell, 2008) and inspire others to have confidence in themselves. Resonant leaders who actively engage using emotional intelligence possess the ability to have resounding effects on their peers by being able identify with their emotions, perceptions, and awareness (Stokes, 2004) to create a positive and more motivated team to work as one collective unit. When individuals have demonstrated good self-awareness, it has shown to produce more positive energy, and awareness around fellow staff members (Fuimano, 2004), and additionally arouse awareness, interest, and confidence through organizational groups. (Hayashi, 2006).

In lieu of the cultural shift from traditional leadership to emotionally intelligent leadership, the medical care industry is also going through its own paradigm shift amongst its own traditional operations. Currently, the U.S. healthcare system has transitioned from a fee for service based financial revenue model to a value-based healthcare for reimbursement (Gapenski & Reiter, 2016) where reimbursements are now distributed to healthcare industries based upon the quality of care. This shift in revenue streams has now incentivizes hospital leadership and organizations to begin focusing on training medical staff to be efficient in resources, adopting of healthcare technology (Ghose, 2017) and becoming more focused and in control of their emotions when tending to patients. Patients and their family members are not only active participants of healthcare, but they are also the consumers of healthcare, thus when tending to patients’ nurses and staff must have the necessary emotional intelligence skills to conduct a quality experience for their patients. (Beydler, 2017).

With patient experience and quality of care now being the center of attention for financial reimbursement across all healthcare fields, hospital organizations have taken the initiative steps forward in hiring nursing staff with the right technical skills. However, also with exceptional emotional intelligent skills ideal for caring for patients. (Beydler, 2017) Nurses are taught to suppress their negative feelings towards patients such as negative surface acting where nurses pretend to feel expected emotions as well as deep acting, when nurses induce themselves to feel the expected emotions. (Vittello-Cicciu, 2003) Recent studies have shown that when peers have negative emotions such as anger, or sadness when making ethical decisions, studies show that the individual in question has higher tendency to make unethical decisions influenced by the negative emotions (Sukumarakurup, 2012) thus leading to a higher risk of patient safety in the healthcare organizations.

Hospitals in return have begun to ensure nurses and staff have the right quality emotional intelligence when treating patients. Teaching employees such as nursing staff leadership fundamentals and proper emotional intelligence are encouraged to become self-managed leaders with the ability to be self-aware of medical decisions and quality of care they provide. In other studies, it was shown that candidates who are taught the fundamentals about their emotions combined with emotional intelligence have demonstrated an increase in positive team performance. (Ashkanasy, 2003) The conclusions that can be drawn from these studies found that individuals became more self-aware and more open to communicating as a team once educated and mindful of their emotions. (Ashkanasy, 2003)

Hypothesis

Emotional intelligent leaders have shown to improve individuals around them with supportive management and having the ability to be self-aware of their emotions, (Fuimano, 2004) as well in stow confidence in themselves by having the necessary leadership attributes to inspire others. (Maxwell, 2008) From the research, and studies conducted into the impacts of having positive emotional intelligence in the workplace, the following hypothesis could be proposed, emotionally intelligent leadership is positively related to the morale, motivation and engagement of individuals in their workplace.

Research

The research planned to be used to conduct a feasible analysis to prove or disprove the proposed hypothesis will consist of recent case studies, field surveys, interviews with managerial figures at various organizations, peer reviewed journal articles, as well as prior research experiments conducted into the analysis of emotional intelligence. The plan to measure these research methods will be to acquire enough information from direct and indirect sources to come to an educated conclusion as to whether the proposed hypothesis has enough evidence to be proven accurate. The problems that can be anticipated with this research can be determining the accuracy and authenticity of the research, the anomalies from conducting field surveys, as well as the various outliers that can occur when collecting live information from its sources.

Works Cited

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