An Empirical Research On The Relationship Between EI Levels And Leadership Effectiveness

The leadership research is always an important topic in the study of organization researches. A large number of researches emerged from different perspectives such as personality, behavior, environment, value, leader-member relationship and so on. Since in 1995 Goleman found that Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EI) was more important than Intelligence Quotient (IQ) in creating a successful leader, many scholars began to examine EI's role in leadership process research.Emotional Intelligence is a measure of one's ability to perceive and regulate the context about emotion. The leader with different levels of emotional intelligence may have different leadership performances, while the staff with different levels of emotional intelligence may also have different work performances and feelings. In the long run, the hard work of all members is the only source of organization performance, it was widely used to measure the performance of leadership from the perspective of subordinates,including job performances and attitudes.This paper focuses on the relation between EI of leaders and the leadership performances. It analyzes the relation between EI and some basic demographic characteristics such as age, gender, level of education, work experience. The influence of employees'emotional intelligences on their own work performances and work attitudes is also discussed.Empirical studies are used to examine the significance of EI in organization. Paper collected questionnaire survey data from eight different enterprises. The survey targets at the middle-level managers (leaders) and their direct subordinates in sample companies. The data collected includes the emotional intelligence of subordinates and superiors, the work performances and attitudes of subordinates, the basic demographic characteristics such as age, gender and level of education.The statistical analysis of data from 230 samples finds these results as follows: Age and the number of work years have a significant positive impact on the level of EI, while the highest academic level and gender are irrelevant to EI level. Emotional intelligence is a core variable that affects the performances of leaders and staffs. The EI of staffs has a significant positive impact on their work performances including role performance and our-role performance. The EI of leaders has a significant positive impact on the out-role performance and organization commitment of subordinates.