هوش عاطفی و ظهور رهبری در گروههای کوچک

We report the findings from two studies that examine the association between emotional intelligence and leadership emergence in small groups. In both studies, members of groups completed measures of emotional intelligence and other individual differences prior to working on a group project. Their peers rated their leadership emergence at the conclusion of the project. Overall emotional intelligence and a number of its dimensions were associated with leadership emergence over and above cognitive intelligence, personality traits, and gender. These findings were observed when emotional intelligence was measured with an ability test but not when it was measured with a self-report scale. Among the dimensions of emotional intelligence, the ability to understand emotions was most consistently associated with leadership emergence.

Emotional intelligence is a set of abilities concerned with processing emotions and emotional information (Mayer & Salovey, 1997, Salovey & Grewal, 2005 and Salovey & Mayer, 1990). This concept has generated considerable interest, but some researchers have questioned its validity (Landy, 2005 and Roberts et al., 2001). Emotional intelligence remains controversial, in part, because there are only a few studies that tested whether it is associated with criteria over and above two extant predictors, cognitive intelligence and personality traits. The paucity of studies impedes the assessment of incremental validity and leaves open the possibility that other individual differences cause spurious associations between emotional intelligence and criteria. To evaluate more completely the validity of emotional intelligence in applied research, studies that test its associations with new criteria over and above other individual differences are needed (Conte, 2005 and Matthews et al., 2002). Past research has shown that emotional intelligence is associated with task performance (Côté & Miners, 2006), the success of formally appointed leaders (Rosete & Ciarrochi, 2005), and public speaking effectiveness (Rode et al., 2007) over and above both cognitive intelligence and personality traits. The goal of this research is to test whether emotional intelligence exhibits incremental associations with a new criterion, leadership emergence. Leadership emergence represents the degree to which a person who is not in a formal position of authority influences the other members of a group (Lord et al., 1986, Schneier & Goktepe, 1983 and Taggar et al., 1999). In self-managing groups, no member is formally appointed as the leader. Instead, the members of self-managing groups assume roles that are flexible and dynamic, so that any member can provide leadership on a specific task. It is possible that one member, several members, or no members of a group exhibit leadership emergence. Leadership emergence is a continuous variable because it reflects the degree to which each member exerts influence, rather than the presence or absence of leadership emergence in each member. The definition of leadership emergence suggests that its correlates may differ from the correlates of the effectiveness of formally appointed leaders. Leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness differ conceptually because they reside at different levels of analysis (Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002). Leadership emergence is a within-group phenomenon, so that some members of a group exert more influence than the other members of the same group. Leadership effectiveness, in contrast, is a between-group phenomenon, so that some groups perform better than other groups because they have more effective leaders. Consistent with these arguments, three major traits of personality — conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness — exhibit different associations with leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness (Judge et al., 2002). Similarly, the findings of past research on emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness (Rosete & Ciarrochi, 2005) may not generalize to leadership emergence. Early attempts to identify the characteristics of emergent leaders took a highly cognitive approach, focusing on behaviors such as gathering information, seeking opinions, and initiating ideas (Fisher, 1974 and Stogdill, 1950). Failing to include emotional concepts in models of leadership emergence, however, may be a serious omission (Pescosolido, 2002). A few studies have examined whether some emotional abilities are associated with leadership emergence in groups (Kellett et al., 2002, Kellett et al., 2006, Offermann et al., 2004 and Wolff et al., 2002). The findings reveal that the abilities to perceive and to express emotions may be positively related to leadership emergence. Our research extends these studies in three significant ways. First, we provide a stronger test of the incremental validity of emotional intelligence with respect to leadership emergence. Past research has controlled for cognitive intelligence (Kellett et al., 2002 and Kellett et al., 2006) and some personality traits (Offermann et al., 2004) separately. Thus, we do not know whether emotional intelligence explains variance in leadership emergence that is not explained by both types of individual difference characteristics. In addition, no study has controlled for self-monitoring, a personality trait that reflects the tendency to monitor and to control one's behavior in social situations (Snyder, 1974). Self-monitoring has been linked to leadership emergence (Ellis, 1988 and Garland & Beard, 1979). To increase our confidence that emotional intelligence explains variance in leadership emergence that is not accounted for by extant individual differences, we simultaneously control for the Big Five personality traits (Studies 1 and 2), cognitive intelligence (Study 2), and self-monitoring (Study 2). Second, we focus on both the broad construct of emotional intelligence and the specific abilities that comprise it to pinpoint how emotional intelligence may contribute to leadership emergence. Past research has examined whether leadership emergence is associated with the ability to perceive emotions (Kellett et al., 2002, Kellett et al., 2006 and Wolff et al., 2002) and the ability to express emotion (Kellett et al., 2006). Other abilities included in models of emotional intelligence, such as the abilities to understand emotions and to regulate emotions (Mayer & Salovey, 1997 and Salovey & Mayer, 1990), have not yet been examined in relation to leadership emergence. To fully understand how emotional intelligence is associated with leadership emergence, it is important to examine the other emotional abilities. Third, there remains a debate about how best to assess emotional intelligence. There have been discussions of the validity of self-report versus ability-based measures of emotional intelligence (cf. Brackett & Mayer, 2003, Brackett et al., 2006, Conte, 2005 and Roberts et al., 2001). No past study, however, has directly compared the validity of the ability test and self-report scale approaches to measuring emotional intelligence with respect to the criterion of leadership emergence. In this research, we compare the criterion validity and incremental validity of the two approaches to inform future decisions about measurement.

The findings from Study 2 extend those of the first study and increase our confidence in the association between emotional intelligence and leadership emergence. Three out of the four correlations remained significant after controlling for cognitive intelligence and self-monitoring in addition to the Big Five personality traits and gender. These results provide further evidence of the incremental validity of emotional intelligence. In addition, they reassure us that the association between emotional intelligence and leadership emergence is not spuriously caused by cognitive intelligence or self-monitoring. The random assignment to groups in Study 2 provides assurance that the association is not an artifact of self-selection into groups.