تاثیر یک برنامه آموزشی طراحی شده برای هدف قرار دادن توانایی های هوش هیجانی مدیران پروژه

Emotional intelligence (EI) has been suggested as underpinning a number of behaviours considered important for project management however few studies have been conducted to date examining whether training can improve EI. A sample of project managers in the UK attended one of three 2-day EI training programmes and the effects of the training evaluated to determine its impact on emotional intelligence abilities, empathy, and the project manager competences of teamwork and managing conflict considered to be underpinned by EI. Using a pre/post test research design, positive effects were found 6 months later in the emotional ability, understanding emotions as well as the two project manager competences. Data collected 1 month post training showed no significant changes. The results suggest that training can have an impact on the emotional intelligence of project managers but that other conditions following attendance on training may also be necessary.

Over the past two decades the “human side” of project management has increasingly been identified as a critical component of the project manager’s role associated with project management success (Cleland, 1995, Cooke-Davies, 2002, Cowie, 2003 and El-Sabaa, 2001). Given that project management involves attempting to get the best input from a wide range of technical specialists and experts, many authors have identified a large part of that role as constituting leadership and effectively managing relationships between all the parties involved in a project (Milosevic et al., 2001 and Strohmeier, 1992). Baker et al. (1983) showed that of the seven factors they identified which together accounted for 91% of the variance between projects that succeeded and those that failed, one factor, co-ordination and relations accounted on its own for 77% of the variance perceived in project success. Yet more recently, Rudolph et al. (2008) also found the behavioural dimension of project management, which included communication, involvement, motivation and identifying conflicts, played a large part in contributing to greater project success. It is against this background that a number of authors have suggested that the concept of emotional intelligence (El) may be an important area of individual difference that may distinguish project managers’ effectiveness in performing these important “human skills” or behaviours (Druskat and Druskat, 2006). To date, five studies have appeared in the literature specifically investigating emotional intelligence in project contexts. These examined relationships between emotional intelligence and either leadership or project management competences associated with “human skills”, and have found some promising positive results (Butler and Chinowsky, 2006, Leban and Zulauf, 2004, Mount, 2006, Muller and Turner, 2007 and Sunindijo et al., 2007). With increasing evidence suggesting that emotional intelligence is able to predict a wide range of key behaviours associated with effectively working in, and managing projects, the question of whether emotional intelligence can be developed is becoming of far greater interest to the project management community. The expectation being that by developing the emotional intelligence of those working in projects, gains should eventually be seen in terms of improvements in those project management behaviours deemed important to successful projects (Turner and Lloyd-Walker, 2008). This study therefore aims to make a contribution specifically to the project management field by examining the effects of training on a sample of project managers in the UK, and identifying whether changes occur in their emotional intelligence and relevant project management competences. The results show some positive effects for training. The findings are therefore of particular significance for those considering how best to design development strategies to enhance project management performance with emotional intelligence as a key focus.

This is the first study to appear in the literature that has investigated whether participation in a short training programme can affect the development of emotional intelligence abilities in project managers. The study found that participation in a 2-day training programme resulted in statistically significant improvements in one of the emotional intelligence abilities tested, the ability to understand emotions. Importantly this positive change was not found immediately following training (1 month later) but was found 6 months post training. The results indicate then, that the impact of training on this ability is unlikely to be seen immediately, requiring some months before any improvements can be detected. This would seem to suggest that although training can provide an initial self-awareness of the importance of emotions, the actual processes associated with the development of this emotional intelligence ability continue taking place after training has taken place, possibly through on-the-job learning mechanisms. This would seem to correspond with other studies that have found developments in ability-derived measures of EI within team learning contexts (C1arke, 2007, Groves et al., 2008 and Moriarty and Buckley, 2003). However the limitations associated with the research design suggest that any conclusions should only be treated as tentative at this stage. The evaluation was based on a study comprising of a sample of only 53 participants. Although such sample sizes are commonly found within the training evaluation literature (Cromwell and Kolb, 2004 and Lim and Morris, 2006) they do nonetheless pose problems with increasing dangers of type I errors (i.e. finding a positive result when in fact the reverse is true). The absence of a suitable comparison group also means that maturational factors cannot be ruled out as accounting for the positive results found. The use of self-ratings to assess project management competences is a further major limitation of the study given that self ratings are generally far more lenient than those from observers (Atwater and Yammarino, 1992). A further problem concerned the significant participant attrition that was encountered particularly at 1 month post training (Time 2). This resulted in a smaller subset of data available for analyzing whether there had been in any change in trainees’ emotional intelligence abilities 1 month immediately following training. It could be that the reduced sample here resulted in the failure to find any positive effects at this time point. Future studies should therefore aim to replicate this study involving larger populations and using more objective measures of project manager competences. Given criticisms that much training for project management has tended to overly focus on the technical and planning aspects of project management, potential gains in a wide range of key project management areas could well be achieved through the additional programmes described here.