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Assessing & training leaders' EI (2013, Journal of Management and Change
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Zammuner, V.L., Dionisio, D., Prandi, K., Agnoli, S. (2013). Assessing and training leaders' emotional intelligence, and testing its influence on leaders' employees. Journal of Management and Change, 2013 № 1/2 (30/31), pp. 145-165
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ASSESSING AND TRAINING LEADERS' EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, AND TESTING ITS INFLUENCE ON LEADERS' EMPLOYEES
Vanda L. Zammuner a, Domenico Dionisiob, Katia Prandi c, Sergio Agnoli a,d
a, b,c,d University of Padova, DPSS a [email protected]
b [email protected] c [email protected]
Abstract The recent literature places emotions at the center of leadership construed as a dynamic process. The present study, with an experimental pre-post design that included an experimental group formed by leaders and their employees, and a control group of employees whose leaders were not assessed, tested whether Self-reported leaders' emotional intelligence (LEI) are congruent with Other-reported LEI, and whether a brief self-administered training program would affect self- and other-reported LEI assessment, as well as Job involvement and Life satisfaction in leaders' employees. At Time 1, leaders of the experimental-group and employees of both the experimental and control group filled in the Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI; Boyatzis, Goleman, & Rhee, 2000) - leaders filled in the Self-reported version; employees filled in the Other-reported version, i.e., rated their leader. All employees evaluated their own Job involvement and Life satisfaction too. At Time 2 (after training experimental-group leaders), experimental-group leaders and both experimental- and control-group employees again rated LEI using ECI; all employees evaluated their own Job involvement and Life satisfaction too. The results overall showed a significant impact of the training on Time 2 measures in the experimental group, both as regards its effect on self- and other-reported LEI assessments, and on employees' outcomes. In particular, Time 2 showed an increase in leaders' ECI Self-assessed Conflict Management and in Other-assessed Service Orientation competencies, and in employees’ Job involvement. The study overall indicates that training leaders’ emotional intelligence can diminish discrepancies in self- and other-reported LEI assessment and increase employees’ positive outcomes.
Keywords: Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Training, Self- and Others-perceptions, Job Involvement, Life Satisfaction.
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1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Leaders' Emotional Intelligence and Employees' Outcomes Modern organizations are constantly trying to improve workplace efficiency by increasing
their employees' commitment and identification. These two aspects of working life derive from, and are a consequence of, the organizational culture (Trice & Beyer, 1993). Organizational culture comprises significant beliefs, norms and values; group members develop a shared identity on the basis of it. As beliefs, norms and values are pregnant of emotional significance, the management of the organizational culture, and consequently, of its members' commitment and identification, needs a leader who is able to handle and influence properly both her own and others' emotions (George, 2000).
When social interactions are involved, Emotional Intelligence (EI) abilities, such as awareness of self and others' emotions, and emotion regulation, are important factors affecting the quality of interactions (Al Noor, Uddin & Shamaly, 2011). According to Goleman (1996), EI plays an increasingly important role at the highest company levels, i.e., where differences in technical skills seem not to be of crucial importance.
The concept of EI was first described in the literature by Salovey and Mayer (1990), and since then attracted considerable research interest, simultaneously intense and controversial. Two distinct theoretical frameworks of EI have emerged: the Ability models and the Trait or mixed models. Ability-models, most closely associated with the work of Salovey and Mayer (1990), hypothesize emotional intelligence to be distinct from dispositional traits, such as personality or empathy, and test the cognitive ability of perceiving, managing and using emotions (and emotional information) to promote problem solving and well-being. Ability EI is assessed through performance measures. Trait models of EI, as advocated by Goleman (1996; 1998) and Bar-On (1997), instead hypothesize emotional intelligence to be a constellation of traits, social behaviors, competencies and motivations. Trait EI is assessed through self-report measures.
Mixed or Trait models have been both advocated and criticized. Support typically centers on contentions of a correlation between EI traits and desired organizational outcomes (Goleman, 1996, 1998; Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2002). Criticism, on the other hand, tends to focus on a lack of content validity in the obtained data (Antonakis, Ashkanasy & Dasborough, 2009), and on overstatements about the benefits of EI (Ashkanasy & Daus, 2005; Grubb & McDaniel, 2007). Nevertheless, in organizational development and practitioner settings the mixed models continue to be widely applied (Bratton, Dodd & Brown, 2011).
Emotions do seem to be relevant for leadership in various ways. To illustrate, a slightly negative mood leads to slower and more accurate decision-making (Sinclair, 1988; Sinclair & Mark, 1992), a useful effect when a leader has to take a complex decision in which an error could compromise the task success. On the other hand, feeling negative emotions (e.g., rage) might jeopardize a leader's ability to establish good relations with employees, compromising their trust in her (Jones & George, 1998). A leader must thus be able to calibrate at best her emotions and be aware that her mood can deeply influence the goodness of her decisions and the organizational climate in general. In sum, it is not hard to imagine scenarios in which the correct or faulty use of emotions can influence leadership efficacy.
The literature in social and organizational psychology suggests that leaders' emotional intelligence (LEI) is important for employees’ emotion-related processes and outcomes at different levels of management (Ashkanasy, Härtel, & Daus, 2002; Mayer, Roberts, & Barsade, 2008). Several studies have examined the effects of leaders' emotions on followers, typically from an interactionist perspective (Riggio & Reichard, 2008). For instance, Lewis (2000), using leaders'
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videotaped speeches, altered leader's emotional displays and found that people who viewed a sad leader reported less enthusiasm than those who viewed an emotionally neutral leader. Sy, Côté, and Saavedra (2005) found that if leaders display positive emotions, their group members report being in a positive mood, whereas they reported negative emotions if the leader's mood was negative. Leaders' mood affected the group’s collective mood too: work groups exposed to negative leader-mood expended more effort in solving problems in comparison to groups with positive leader-mood, whereas those exposed to positive leader-mood exhibited greater coordination. The study thus showed that leaders' emotion displays have significant effects both on subordinates' emotions and on work-group performance. Jordan, Ashkanasy, Hartel & Hooper (2002), within a study that tested the development of a new measure of workgroup EI, found that high-EI teams (within which the leadership role mostly rotated) performed at a higher level than low-EI teams - although the latter raised their performance with time after engaging in various tasks dealing with management skills and communication. Finally, Kerr, Garvin, Heaton, and Boyle (2006) found that employees rated as more effective leaders those managers who scored higher on the experiential branch of the EI-ability test MSCEIT (e.g., Brackett & Mayer, 2003).
A few studies, furthermore, have examined the effects of LEI on employees’ job-related outcomes. For instance, Wong and Law (2002) found that managers’ self-perceived EI (measured by WLEIS, the authors' newly developed 16-item measure mapping 4 EI skills) was positively related to their subordinates’ job satisfaction. Likewise, Sy, Tram and O'Hara (2006) found that managers’ self-perceived EI (measured by WLEIS; Wong & Law, 2002) was positively related to their subordinates’ job satisfaction and performance, independently of subordinates’ personality traits, and Kafetsios, Nezlek and Vassiou (2011) showed that leaders' self-reported ability to use emotions (as tested by WLEIS) was positively related to their employees' job satisfaction, whereas their ability to regulate their own emotions (WLEIS) had (unexpected) negative outcomes, i.e., it was positively related to their employees' negative affect, and negatively related to their job satisfaction. Finally, Bono, Foldes, Vinson and Muros (2007) showed that supervisors influenced their employees' emotions in various ways, the most positive effects being associated with supervisors who were high on transformational leadership - e.g., their employees experienced more positive emotions at work, including during interactions with coworkers and customers, and a lesser decrease in job satisfaction after stressful interactions.
Although employees’ perception of their leader’s emotional skills is likely to be highly relevant in affecting employees' work-related aspects (e.g., employees' level of job satisfaction or involvement), available studies in the literature have focused on leaders' LEI self-perceptions, without taking into account how LEI is perceived by the leaders' employees. As Sala (2003) argued, rather than possessing a good understanding of themselves, as one would expect from such higher-rank employees, leaders are likely to have an inflated view of their emotional competence, often incongruent with its perception by others who work with them. Sala (2003) explained this perception discrepancy by suggesting that, as managers move up within an organization, they have fewer opportunities to get feedback from others and to calibrate their self-perceptions.
In sum, although available evidence clearly supports the hypothesis that leaders' emotional intelligence (LEI) crucially contributes to define several emotion-related processes and outcomes in leaders' associated employees (or workgroups), we need to assess to what extent leaders' LEI self-perceptions are congruent with LEI perceptions by those who work with them, and further verify what impact leaders' LEI has on employees.
1.2. The training of Emotional Intelligence in Leadership studies The great interest stimulated by the construct of Emotional Intelligence (EI) both in academics and in human resources professionals has quickly translated into applied efforts, especially as regards whether people can increase their EI by means of training and development programs. However, as
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argued for instance by Groves, McEnrue & Shen (2008), empirical evidence on EI development due to training efforts has been substantially quite elusive, characterized by methodological and theoretical limitations (e.g., lack of a control group, reliance on EI measures of unknown psychometric quality and on training programs not specifically focused on EI) that call into question the reported results.
A few carefully designed studies conducted with student populations found support for the hypothesis that EI training interventions result in the development of EI. For example, Jaeger (2003) found that the (graduate-students) EI-training group, compared to the control group who did not receive the EI intervention, reported an increase in self-perceived EI (measured by EQ-i; Bar-On, 1997) over the period of a semester - but, as the author was careful to point out, observed changes did not necessarily imply that EI teaching resulted in actual behavioral or emotional changes, and stressed the need for research employing ability-based measures (the ability model promotes training methods that induce change in cognitive and emotional learning of actual skills). A very recent study, carried out with undergraduate students, examined whether an EI training program, comprising several sessions and designed to enhance specific emotional competencies (e.g., understanding and regulating one’s and others’ emotions), resulted in the improvement of emotional abilities as assessed through various measures (Nélis, Kotsou, Quoidbach, Hansenne, Weytens, Dupuis & Mikolajczak, 2011). The results showed that the EI-training-group members improved their emotion regulation and emotion understanding abilities, whereas the control group members did not change.
A few controlled studies on EI training programs specifically addressed to leaders have also been conducted. Among available contributions, three studies are especially worth mentioning here. Slaski and Cartwright (2003) administered a full training-day each week for 4 weeks to a group of managers and found an increase of EI (measured by EQ-i; Bar-On, 1997), health status and better reactions to the job (for example, increase of job satisfaction and decrease of work-family conflict). On a much larger time-interval scale, Cherniss, Grimm & Liautaud (2010) administered a 2-year process-designed training that focused on self-management, awareness of other's feelings and relationship-building exercises, and found an increase of both self-perceived and others' evaluation of EI (measured by ECI; Boyatzis, Goleman & Rhee, 2000). Finally, Groves, McEnrue & Shen (2008) tested the effects of an intensive 11-week EI training program, comprising a variety of exercises and activities designed to tap and enhance the basic EI abilities, in 135 fully-employed business students, and showed, on the basis of several well-established measures, plus a new EI measure especially designed for the purpose, that the EI training had positive effects compared with the results obtained by a control group.
In general, however, evaluations of EI training programs, if carried out at all, are limited to subjective post-training evaluations, and/or to evaluations performed after a certain amount of time (Goleman, 1996; Matthews, Zeidner & Roberts, 2002) and do not ascertain the impact of leaders' training on specific aspects of employees' variables, such as employees’ commitment or wellbeing. Typical management-development efforts suffer from other limitations too. Besides the lack of an adequate experimental design (i.e., the absence of a control group) in most empirical studies, as mentioned above, the effectiveness of most managerial EI-training programs is highly dependent on the personal qualities and skills of individual trainers or coaches. Finally, to be effective, EI-training programs need to be fairly intensive in terms of both time and effort (Cherniss & Adler, 2000; see the Groves et al. (2008) program as an example), with resulting high costs (whether the program involves assessment, feedback, and/or coaching), and are thus difficult to implement, especially when organizations encounter hard times.
In sum, enthusiasm in EI-training programs has not been accompanied by much scientific research on the topic, and even less by research specifically targeting the leader role. Whereas EI programs for children have been developed, validated, and generally obtain positive outcomes (see Zins, Payton, Weissberg, & Utne O’Brien, 2007 for a review), studies on EI-training programs that
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target the adult population are few and the scientific evidence for their effectiveness is limited (Wong, Foo, Want, & Wong, 2007). Finally, most EI-training programs lack a clear theoretical and methodological framework, employing techniques whose psychological bases are sometimes dubious (Matthews, Zeidner & Roberts, 2002; 2007; Groves et al., 2008). Thus more studies that try and address these limitations are necessary to verify the effects of EI-training programs of leaders.
1.3. The study: Assessing and training leaders’ EI and its impact on employees The current study was designed to contribute further experimental evidence as regards
leaders' emotional intelligence (LEI), taking into account some of the literature limitations discussed in the previous section.
The study moved from the assumption that to better understand several crucial leadership issues - such as leaders' level of EI and leaders' ability to influence the organizational climate - it is necessary to take into account the psychological and emotional components of a dyad, i.e., that formed by a leader and her employees (subordinates), e.g., considering both self and others' evaluation of LEI.
Sampling participants belonging to small working groups (three-four employees and one leader) in a variety of organizational settings, the present study focuses on three issues that the above review of the literature indicates as being quite crucial:
(a) the perception that both leaders and their employees have of LEI,
(b) the effects of LEI on employees' work outcomes (job involvement) and subjective wellbeing (life satisfaction),
(c) the effects of a short self-administered LEI training procedure on LEI perception on the one hand, by (c1) leaders and (c2) their employees, and on employees' work-related aspects, i.e., (c3) job involvement and (c4) subjective wellbeing on the other hand. If the training were successful, it ought to influence not only leaders' subjective self EI-evaluation post-training, but also her employees' evaluation of LEI, as well as their self-evaluation with regard to their own well being in terms of job involvement and life satisfaction.
By comparing self versus others’ evaluation of LEI, the study tests whether LEI self evaluations are congruent with employees’ pre-training evaluation of it and whether evaluations change post-training. By assessing the relationship between LEI and employees’ job involvement and life satisfaction, the study tests whether pre-training LEI scores are associated with employees' self-evaluations of work-related aspects, and whether LEI training helps to establish an organizational climate that translates itself into better employees’ scores post-training on work-related aspects.
To address these issues, the study adopted an experimental design that compares evaluations and leader-effects in the experimental group (comprising employees of leaders who undergo the training, and the leaders themselves) with the effects in a control group (comprising employees of not-trained leaders) at two times, i.e., pre- and post training.
The training program. The study employed a training program called Tremints (Training Emotional and Interpersonal Skills (e.g., Zammuner, 2010; Zammuner & Arduini, 2012; Verzeletti, Agnoli, Zammuner, Kafetsios & Nascimbeni, 2012). Tremints adapted and further developed a program devised by Zammuner & Kafetsios (2005) within a European project conducted with several hundred career-starters, men and women, from England, Greece, Italy and the Slovak Republic in the period 2004-2005 (e.g., Kafetsios & Zammuner, 2005; Kafetsios, Maridaki-Kassotaki, Zammuner, Zampetakis & Vouzas, 2009). In that European administration of Tremints, participants showed a significant increase in many work-related EI competencies (self-awareness, self-management and social relations), abilities (perception of emotion, managing others' emotions, empathy at work) and in the frequency of positive affect (e.g., Kafetsios & Zammuner, 2005).
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Tremints was designed following a theoretical scientifically-based framework. That is, the program incorporates elements that pertain, implicitly or explicitly, to aspects of the information processing skills and strategies that underlie emotional intelligence. It involves both instructional and first-person affective/experiential components, with the aim of increasing emotion awareness - a construct closely related to Izard's (2001) emotion knowledge; see also Robinson and Clore (2002) for a discussion of emotions, as experiential, contextually based phenomena, versus beliefs about emotion, i.e., semantic, conceptual, and decontextualized knowledge. The main hypothesis underlying the development of Tremints is that emotion awareness is a core element of EI, at the basis of, and connecting the interrelated set of skills that constitute EI (Boyatzis, 1996; Mayer, Salovey & Caruso, 2000). For instance, in order to process emotional information (e.g., experiencing empathy, or using emotional information to direct one’s next action), one has first to register an emotion (perception) and then understand or appraise its meaning. Although there is scarce empirical evidence that EI abilities are organized in a specified hierarchical form (except for the claim that specific EI skills, or facets, are organized into a higher level global or total EI; e.g., Petrides, 2011; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2008), the primacy of the perception and understanding abilities for the development of EI as a whole is a very plausible assumption, especially considering the developmental perspective (e.g., Saarni, 1999; see also Mayer, Roberts, & Barsade, 2008).
To meet users' and theoretical needs, the Tremints method exists in various versions. Its most-extended version includes more than thirty exercises of various kinds, from those that activate experiential knowledge (e.g. perception of facial expressions of emotion) to those that activate episodic memories (e.g. recall and narrate (or reflect on) emotion episodes at work or in one’s private life, including conflict and shame events), to those that activate semantic, cognitive representations (e.g., recall and evaluate similarities and differences among emotion concepts), to those that focus on emotional responding and on self versus others' feelings and viewpoints (e.g., a series of exercises describe a variety of working scenarios (e.g., ‘Your boss tells you that your work has been unacceptable and needs to be improved’) and the trainee has to report how she felt and how her colleague or boss felt). The extended version requires about 10 hours of work to be completed. All Tremints versions are designed to be self-administered, and the training can be done online - although any Tremints exercise (session) might be completed also with the help of a coach or instructor, also in a group session.
In this study, a short, basic version of 14 exercises, still tapping the various EI abilities was used (this short version was previously used with a large sample of career starters (e.g., Verzeletti et al., 2012) that included individuals with leadership roles too) (see the Method section for more details).
1.4. Hypotheses
The first set of hypotheses of this study focuses on the congruency between leaders' and employees' perception of LEI at Time 1, i.e., pre-training, and Time 2, i.e., post-training. We hypothesized that employees' perception of LEI and leaders' self-perceived emotional competencies – measured by Emotional Competence Inventory, ECI (Boyatzis et al., 2000) would be discrepant one with the other at Time 1, and conversely we expected that LEI training would reduce this gap between self-perception and others' perceptions at Time 2.
• H1: (a) At Time 1 Leaders evaluate themselves as more emotionally competent than their employees do, as indexed by differences between ECI-Self and ECI-Others evaluations.
• H1: (b) At Time 2 differences between ECI-Self and ECI-Others decrease.
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The second group of hypotheses concerns whether Leaders' emotional competencies improve after they are trained, and whether such improvement appears in employees' evaluations of their leader, and in leaders' self-evaluations.
• H2: (a) We expected ECI-Self to improve from Time 1 to Time 2.
• H2: (b) We expected ECI-Others to improve from Time 1 to Time 2. The improvement was expected to be higher in the experimental group (whose leaders undergo the training) than in the control group.
The final hypothesis focuses on the impact of LEI training on employees' job involvement and life satisfaction.
• H3: We expected employees' Job Involvement and Life Satisfaction to increase from Time 1 to Time 2 in the experimental group (and not in the control group).
2. METHOD
The study was articulated in three temporal phases. Both the assessment phases and the training procedures were completed online.
At Time 1, Leaders completed the ECI-Self report version (Boyatzis et al., 2000; see measures below), i.e., assessed their self-perceived emotional competencies. Still at Time 1, employees associated with a leader (experimental group) were asked to rate their leader LEI using ECI-Others version, as well as their own Job Involvement (Kanungo, 1982; Zammuner & Galli, 2005a) and Life Satisfaction (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985; Zammuner & Galli, 2005a, 2005b). Following this phase, the training program Tremints was administered to the leaders (i.e., those who accepted the invitation to perform it). A month after leaders completed the training procedure, i.e., at Time 2, participants were asked to fill in the same measures used at Time 1. As stated above, the study design compares the experimental group - leaders that undergo the training, and their employees - to a control group of employees not associated with a leader (i.e., whose leaders were not directly assessed and were not trained).
2.1. Participants The total sample was composed of 97 participants: 68 employees and 29 leaders. All
participants worked in various organizations in the North of Italy, both in public administration and in private companies. Participants did various kinds of work; e.g. front-office tasks with direct contact with clients, no-profit social activities, and administration/back office tasks. Participants were recruited in informal ways, with a convenience sampling method. Participants were assigned to the experimental or the control group if they met the following criteria: (a) the leaders' as well as their employees' measures (ECI Self- and Other-evaluations of leasers, and employees' own work-aspects evaluations) at Time 1 had been collected before the leader started the training, and were available at Time 2 too, and (b) employees' leaders performed the training (experimental group) or did not (control group)1.
Table 1 summarizes the sample composition at Time 1 and 2, and participants' age and sex. More specifically, at Time 1, the experimental group was composed of 46 employees whose leader
1 Although about 80% of the people who had been invited had initially agreed to participate in the study, some leaders had later to be excluded on the basis of the a criterion – i.e., on the one hand the employees associated with 6 leaders did not complete Time 1 measures (ECI-Other, and evaluation of own Job involvement and Life satisfaction) before their leaders started the training; on the other hand 16 leaders had to be excluded because they did not manage (or did not try) to get one or more of their employees to fill in the required measures (ECI-Other, Job involvement, Life satisfaction).
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was trained. Each leader was associated with 1 to 5 employees at most taking part in the study. The ratings provided by the n employees for each leader were averaged by leader. The leaders who completed the training procedure (experimental group) were 29. The control group was composed of 22 employees whose leader did not follow any training. (see Tab. 1). At Time 2, because of the withdrawal of some participants, the experimental group was composed of 14 leaders and 32 associated employees, whereas the employee control-group was composed of 18 people (see Tab. 1).
As the number of participants varies as a function of what specific comparison and what variables are considered in each analysis (e.g., participants at Time 1 versus at Time 2), each table in the Results section specifies which sub-sample(s) the results apply to, and the number of participants in the sub-sample(s).
Table 1. Participant samples at Time 1 and Time 2.
Gender Samples at Time 1 n Mean Age (s.d.) M F
Leaders 29 45 (9.3) 23 6
Employees - Experimental Group 46 38 (10.9) 18 28
Employees - Control Group 22 42 (12.3) 6 16
Samples at Time 2
Leaders 14 45 (7.9) 13 1
Employees - Experimental Group 32 38 (10.7) 14 18
Employees - Control Group 18 42 (12.4) 6 12
Table 2. Mean scores of Control and Experimental employees at Time 1.
Experimental Group
(N= 29)
Control
Group
(N=22)
t
M Sd M Sd
Job Involvement 2.16 .85 1.71 1.00 1.74
Life Satisfaction 3.12 .96 3.17 1.07 -.19
Self-Awareness (ECI-Others) 2.50 .69 2.63 .71 -.66
Self-Management (ECI-Others) 2.35 .54 2.59 .62 -1.45
Social-Awareness (ECI-Others) 2.65 .59 2.81 .72 -.91
Relationships Management (ECI-Others) 2.40 .71 2.61 .83 -.99
2.2. Measures 1) Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI). The Emotional Competence Inventory (Boyatzis
et al., 2000) is a so-called 360° assessment instrument, used to evaluate emotional competencies as proposed by Goleman (1998). It is composed of 72 items rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale, plus a
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“don't know” option. The ECI-Self version had been translated and validated in Italian in previous studies (e.g., Kafetsios et al., 2009; Kafetsios, Zammuner, Zorzi & Lanciano, 2011). For this study, the ECI-Others version was adapted from the Italian self-version. The Emotional Competencies assessed by ECI are 18 and cluster in 4 macro-competencies: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness and Relationships Management. We computed ECI scores separately for the Self and Others versions. ECI-Self alpha coefficients for this study were: Self-Awareness α=.78; Self-Management α=.64; Social Awareness α=.74; Relationships Management α=.85. The obtained coefficients are overall similar to those of a previous study that included a larger Italian sample (Self-Awareness α=.74; Self-Management α=.82; Social Awareness α=.79; Relationships Management α=.88) (Kafetsios et. al, 2011). For ECI-Others, alpha coefficients were higher, indicating that this version is solid and reliable: Self-Awareness α=.85; Self-Management α=.89; Social Awareness α=.89; Relationships Management α=.95.
2) Life Satisfaction Scale. The Life Satisfaction Scale (Diener et. al, 1985; Italian version validated by Zammuner and colleagues (see Zammuner & Galli, 2005a, 2005b, and references thereof) comprises 5 items rated on a 6-points Likert-type scale (strongly disagree - strongly agree) and assesses the global self-perception of quality of life. The internal reliability of the scale in this study was α .85.
3) Job Involvement Scale. The Job Involvement Scale (Kanungo, 1982) comprises 10 items rated on a 6-points Likert-type scale (strongly disagree - strongly agree). High scores on the scale indicate high identification with one's own job, rather than with work in general. Studies by Zammuner and her team (e.g., Galli & Zammuner, 2004; Zammuner and Galli, 2005a) on several Italian samples of employees previously validated the one factor structure of the scale. The internal reliability of the scale in this study was α .92.
4) Training of emotional and interpersonal skills (Tremints). As stated, a short version of Tremints (see section 1.3) was used for this study. It included 14 self-administered online exercises, some requiring open answers (e.g., describing own experiences of basic emotions; describing own experiences of conflict events), others closed answers (e.g., rating facial expressions of emotions; rating adequacy of behavioral reactions to work-setting events; rating level of pleasantness of various emotions). Each exercise constituted an independent online session. Participants could stop after completing an exercise and resume the training later on, at their own pace. Sessions had to be completed in a pre-defined order. The total training could be completed in about two to three hours. Participants were told that the optimal time interval to complete the training, in order for it to be effective, was 7-10 days.
2.3. Data Analysis A first analysis was performed to check whether employees in the Experimental and the
Control group did not differ significantly one from the other at baseline (i.e., at Time 1 before the Experimental group leaders were trained); the scores of Experimental and Control group employees were thus compared. Several data analyses were then performed to test the hypotheses - recall that, as stated, employees' ratings were averaged with regard to their leader, thus the number of employees scores equals the number of their leaders and all analyses refer to such leader-averaged scores - e.g., job-involvement scores in table 2 for the employees' experimental group were collected from 46 individuals but averaged over their associated 29 leaders.
To check whether groups differed, t tests were computed on obtained scores (e.g., on Time 1 versus Time 2 ECI and Life Satisfaction scores); to check associations between tested variables (e.g., between leaders' ECI-Self and employees' Job involvement evaluations), correlational analyses were performed.
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More specifically, to test H1, i.e., whether leaders' evaluations of their own emotional intelligence differed from their employees evaluation of it, ECI-Self and ECI-Others scores were compared, separately at Time 1 and Time 2. To test H2a, i.e., whether ECI-Self scores increased post-training at Time 2, we compared ECI-Self scores at Time 2 with those obtained at Time 1. To test H2b, i.e., whether employees' evaluation of their leaders' emotional intelligence increased post-training at Time 2, we compared ECI-Others scores at Time 2 with those obtained at Time 1, both for the Experimental and the Control group. To test H3, i.e., whether employees' Job Involvement and Life Satisfaction increased at Time 2, we calculated an index of change (i.e., delta, by subtracting Time 1 values from Time 2 values) between Time 1 and Time 2 for each of the two measures and compared the Control group to the Experimental group; to check the effect size of the significant results, we performed Cohen's d.
Table 3. Correlations of Leaders' ECI-Self and ECI-Others Macro-Competencies scores with their employees' Job Involvement and Life Satisfaction at Time 1. (Experimental group, N = 29).
Job Involvement
Life Satisfaction
Self-Awareness (ECI-Self) -.30 -.15
Self-Management (ECI-Self) -.15 -.07
Social-Awareness (ECI-Self) .09 .03
Relationships Management (ECI-Self) -.15 -.01
Self-Awareness (ECI-Others) .31 .30
Self-Management (ECI-Others) .16 .32
Social-Awareness (ECI-Others) .35 .31
Relationships Management (ECI-Others) .19 .36
3. RESULTS
A first result of importance is that employees in the Experimental and the Control group did not differ one from the other at Time 1 as regards the main variables of this study, i.e., their Job involvement and Life satisfaction, and their evaluation of their leader's LEI (see Tab. 2). In general, obtained ratings showed that all employees reported a low to medium level of Job involvement and Life satisfaction, and evaluated their leader's emotional competencies as somewhat in the middle range. As the comparison between the two groups of employees showed that they were totally similar, the results support the validity of the experimental design and allow us to focus on differences between the two groups at Time 1 and Time 2 as being related to the tested variables .
The correlational analyses of the experimental-group employees’ Job Involvement and Life Satisfaction scores with ECI scores at Time 1 (i.e., both leaders' self-evaluations and employees’ evaluations of them) showed that LEI evaluations, both ECI-Self and ECI-Others, did not correlate with employees' Job involvement and Life satisfaction (see Tab. 3). In other words, how employees felt at Time 1, the baseline measures, was unrelated both to how employees assessed their leaders, and to how their leaders assessed themselves.
To test hypothesis H1a, i.e., whether self-perceived and others-perceived LEI are congruent with each other, we performed t tests on ECI-Self and ECI-Others scores at Time 1. The results (see Tab. 4, Time 1 columns) showed that leaders rated themselves as more emotionally competent than their employees did in 12 out of 18 Emotional Competencies. Hypothesis H1a was thus supported: leaders evaluate themselves as being more emotionally intelligent than their employees believe, a
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result that unfortunately supports the view (Sala, 2003) that leaders tend to have an inflated view of their emotional competence, likely to result in bad organizational outcomes (e.g., bad quality of leader-employee relationship, low employee's job involvement).
At Time 2, i.e., after the training, Self- and Others-rated evaluations of LEI overall still differed significantly as they did at Time 1, but to a lesser extent, i.e., significant Self versus Others differences decreased from 12 to 10 (see Tab. 4, Time 2 columns), with leaders' Adaptability, Initiative, Optimism, Transparency, Empathy, Influence, Service orientation, and Teamwork & Collaboration being similarly evaluated by leaders and their employees. Hypothesis H1b, that differences between ECI-Self and ECI-Others decrease at Time 2, i.e. post-training, was thus supported.
Table 4. ECI-Self and ECI-Others 18-Competencies scores at Time 1 and Time 2, and t values on the differences between them.
TIME 1 (N = 27) TIME 2 (N= 10)
ECI-SELF ECI-OTHERS
t ECI-SELF ECI-OTHERS
t
M Sd M Sd M Sd M Sd
Accurate Self-Assessment
2.85 .62 2.34 .83 2.92b 3.13 .57 2.18 .84 2.74a
Emotional Self-Awareness
3.07 .53 2.38 .70 4.46c 3.21 .42 2.51 .62 2.94a
Self-Confidence 2.92 .56 2.73 .83 1.09 3.22 .62 2.60 .77 4.43a
Achievement Orientation
2.99 .42 2.82 .81 2.82b 2.83 .69 2.24 .73 2.39a
Adaptability 2.82 .43 2.34 .69 3.32c 2.90 .55 2.28 .70 2.04
Self-Control 2.20 .47 1.99 .53 1.33 2.62 .54 2.08 .46 2.91a
Initiative 2.47 .55 2.07 .72 2.45a 2.40 .70 2.06 .79 1.10
Optimism 2.78 .48 2.46 .70 2.36a 2.77 .39 2.44 .46 1.68
Transparency 2.73 .62 2.21 .66 3.28c 2.63 .55 2.05 .57 2.02
Empathy 2.93 .56 2.36 .85 3.22c 2.95 .64 2.16 .89 2.06
Organizational Awareness
2.98 .66 2.62 .69 2.11a 3.17 .74 2.66 .63 2.73a
Service Orientation 3.21 .54 2.87 .64 2.76b 3.09 .62 2.85 .67 1.56
Change Catalyst 2.69 .59 2.15 .89 2.89b 2.83 .65 1.82 .82 3.50b
Conflict Management 2.61 .82 2.44 1.03 .77 2.95 .64 1.95 .93 2.98a
Developing Others 2.79 .42 2.31 .77 2.96b 3.00 .59 2.36 .96 2.32a
Influence 2.33 .70 2.24 .64 .60 2.50 .61 2.42 .65 .46
Inspirational Leadership
2.79 .46 2.45 .96 1.58 2.83 .43 2.10 .89 2.50a
Teamwork & Collaboration
2.87 .55 2.67 .85 1.30 3.13 .71 2.72 .78 1.51
Significance level of t values: a = .05; b = .01; c = .001
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Table 5. Leaders' ECI-Self scores at Time 1 and Time 2 (N = 13)
Time 1 Time 2
M Sd M Sd t
Accurate Self-Assessment 2.97 .53 3.10 .50 -.89
Emotional Self-Awareness 3.09 .56 3.20 .37 -.89
Self-Confidence 2.94 .37 3.17 .54 -1.61
Achievement Orientation 2.96 .37 2.86 .61 .68
Adaptability 2.89 .31 2.89 .48 0
Self-Control 2.28 .52 2.50 .54 -1.55
Initiative 2.37 .60 2.32 .64 .26
Optimism 2.77 .42 2.79 .35 -.21
Transparency 2.67 .52 2.74 .49 -.42
Empathy 3.07 .58 3.00 .68 .38
Organizational Awareness 3.00 .64 3.13 .65 -.69
Service Orientation 3.23 .45 3.12 .55 .86
Change Catalyst 2.79 .60 2.77 .61 .17
Conflict Management 2.50 .73 2.88 .58 -2.13a
Developing Others 2.81 .40 2.96 .53 -.89
Influence 2.45 .69 2.56 .53 -.81
Inspirational Leadership 2.77 .49 2.90 .32 -.79
Teamwork & Collaboration 2.90 .65 3.08 .61 -1.65
Significance level of t values: a = .05.
To test whether the training influenced leaders' own subjective evaluation of their EI (hypothesis H2a), we performed t tests on ECI-Self scores at T1 and T2. The results (see Tab. 5) showed that leaders' evaluation of their own Conflict Management competence increased at Time 2; Cohen’s d was -.91, indicating a strong effect size. Furthermore, most leaders' self-evaluations at Time 2 were higher than those at Time 1, although the differences did not reach statistical significance.
The results thus showed that the EI training was helpful to partially increase leaders' self-perception of their own EI. However, if the training simply induced a better EI self-evaluation, its effect would be quite negative, i.e., it would simply contribute to increase leaders' inflated view of their emotional competence. The crucial test, therefore, concerns the effects that leaders' training has on their employees' perception of their EI, i.e., whether employees at Time 2 judge their leader's LEI as better than at Time 1 (hypothesis H2b), and, if so, whether this perception of increased leader's LEI occurs for the Experimental group but not for the Control group employees whose leaders were not trained.
To test the hypothesis (H2b), we performed t tests on ECI-Others scores at T1 and T2 separately for the Control and the Experimental group. As Table 6 shows, for the Control group
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there were no significant differences between T1 and T2 ECI-Others scores. For the Experimental group we found instead an increase in employees' evaluation of their leader's Service Orientation competence-score, with a Cohen's d of .68, indicating a moderate to strong effect. Furthermore, employees' evaluations of four more leaders' competencies as measured by ECI-Others, namely Transparency, Organizational Awareness, Developing Others, and Teamwork & collaboration, showed a marginally significant increase from T1 to T2, i.e., after leaders' training.
In sum, hypothesis H2 was confirmed in that the training did induce some significant or nearly significant changes in the Experimental group - with respect to Time 1 scores - both in leaders' self assessment of their EI, and in their employees' perception of it (namely, as regards the ECI-Self evaluated Conflict Management competence, and the ECI-Others evaluated Service Orientation competence), whereas the Control-group employees' evaluations of their leaders did not change with time.
Table 6. ECI-Others scores at Time 1 and Time 2 for Control and Experimental Employees.
CONTROL GROUP
(N=16)
EXPERIMENTAL GROUP
(N=20)
T1 T2 T1 T2
ECI
M Sd M Sd t
M Sd M Sd t
Accurate Self-Assessment 2.38 1.00 2.41 .84 -.17 2.16 .91 2.22 .62 -.30
Emotional Self-Awareness 2.67 .74 2.79 .87 -.73 2.20 .73 2.54 .51 -1.54
Self-Confidence 2.95 .75 3.09 .73 -1.43 2.56 .85 2.72 .72 -1.02
Achievement Orientation 2.91 .92 2.80 .81 .59 2.32 .86 2.51 .69 -1.34
Adaptability 2.70 .75 2.83 .80 -1.02 2.22 .68 2.43 .57 -1.32
Self-Control 2.87 .92 2.94 .91 -.67 2.49 .89 2.72 .65 -1.10
Initiative 2.44 .83 2.48 .77 -.23 2.03 .72 2.12 .59 -.91
Optimism 2.89 .72 2.81 1.03 .49 2.38 .70 2.56 .52 -.99
Transparency 2.42 .66 2.39 .63 .19 2.05 .67 2.25 .56 -1.81t
Empathy 2.53 .78 2.67 .81 -1.32 2.27 .93 2.42 .75 -.80
Organizational Awareness 2.93 .86 3.07 .72 -1.40 2.46 .69 2.70 .64 -1.87t
Service Orientation 3.03 1.06 3.02 1.07 .06 2.72 .66 2.95 .61 -2.20a
Change Catalyst 2.63 .83 2.71 .86 -.47 1.90 .84 2.12 .67 -1.23
Conflict Management 2.42 1.11 2.25 1.19 1.16 2.18 .98 2.23 .87 -.18
Developing Others 2.62 1.16 2.69 1.07 -.75 2.13 .81 2.49 .75 -1.98t
Influence 2.78 .56 2.81 .54 -.27 2.18 .56 2.40 .76 -1.30
Inspirational Leadership 2.59 1.14 2.70 1.08 -.99 2.26 .97 2.40 .82 -.80
Teamwork & Collaboration 2.92 .85 2.86 .86 .41 2.51 .91 2.84 .65 -1.87t
Significance level of t values: a = .05; t = .10.
The final questions addressed in the study focused on the relationship between leaders' EI and their employees' well being - as indexed by Job Involvement and Life Satisfaction. To check if employees' Job Involvement and Life Satisfaction increased with their leaders' training (hypothesis
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H3), we calculated an index of change (delta) between Time 1 and Time 2, subtracting Time 1 from Time 2 scores. The delta values of the Experimental- and Control-group employees were then compared with a t test. The results showed that Job Involvement increased from Time 1 to Time 2 in the Experimental-group significantly more than in the Control group (Experimental group: M = .56, s. d. = .94; Control group: M = -.17, s. d. = .47; t = 3.02, p ≥ .001), with a Cohen's d of .99, indicating a very strong effect. No significant difference between the Control and Experimental group was instead obtained as regards the Life Satisfaction change index. H3 was thus confirmed for Job Involvement, a central organizational outcome. Furthermore, the analyses of the correlations at Time 2 between ECI scores and employees’ wellbeing showed (see Tab. 7) that employees' Job Involvement positively and highly correlated with their judgement of all four EI macro competencies of their leaders (ECI-Others); employees' Life Satisfaction instead positively correlated with ECI-Others Self-Management only. Employees’ Job Involvement and Life Satisfaction were instead both unrelated to ECI-Self assessments. In other words, how emotionally competent leaders are perceived by their employees (rather than how leaders judge themselves) significantly matters for employees' job involvement level and to some extent for their life satisfaction.
Table 7. Correlations of Leaders' ECI-Self and ECI-Others scores with their employees’ Job Involvement and Life Satisfaction scores at Time 2.
Job Involvement Life Satisfaction
Self-Awareness (ECI-Self) .14 .55
Self-Management (ECI-Self) -.32 .22
Social-Awareness (ECI-Self) .01 .37
Relationships Management (ECI-Self) -.11 .60
Self-Awareness (ECI-Others) .55* .23
Self-Management (ECI-Others) .64** .44*
Social-Awareness (ECI-Others) .60** .19
Relationships Management (ECI-Others) .60** .38
Significance level * ≥ p .01, ** ≥ p .01
ECI-Self: N = 10; ECI-Others: N = 21.
4. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 4.1. Leaders' Emotional Intelligence: Discrepancies Between Assessments by Self And by Employees . To recapitulate, the main results of this study were that, at baseline, leaders do perceive themselves as more emotionally competent than their employees' evaluation suggest, but the incongruence between EI-competence evaluations by Self and Others (leaders' employees) diminishes after leaders are briefly trained on basic emotional skills. Leaders who underwent the training were better able - in comparison to pre-training - to handle conflicts within the organization in their employees' perception, and perceived themselves as more proficient mediators. No changes in employees' evaluations of their leaders' emotional intelligence occurred instead in the control group of employees whose leader was not trained. Finally, employees' Job Involvement, and to a less extent their Life Satisfaction, did correlate with how employees perceive their leader, whereas they were not associated with their leader's self-perceived emotional intelligence.
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More specifically, the study, confirming hypothesis H1a and supporting previously made claims (Sala, 2003), showed that leaders do rate themselves as more emotionally competent than their employees believe. The self-enhancing evaluation observed in leaders might in part reflect the commonly noted bias in self-report measures, i.e., social desirability, a bias that we might expect to be particularly salient in the organizational setting where giving a good (or better) image of oneself is particularly relevant (e.g., Norman & Podsakoff, 1992; Donaldson & Grant-Vallone, 2002). The discrepancy between Self and Other EI evaluations might however also reflect situationally and context based conflicts that often and understandably occur between higher- and lower-level employees. Thus, employees' evaluation of their leaders might be contaminated by an opposite type of bias, namely, the tendency to underestimate their leader's competencies. Employees' devaluing attitude may depend for example on their grade of acceptance of formal authority and on their locus of control (House, 1971). Given that these kinds of biases are likely to be common when using assessing instruments of the 360° type, future studies could profit by employing, for ECI-Self version, a scale that assesses the tendency of socially desirable responding, and, for ECI-Others version, one or more scales that measure the opposite tendency, i.e., respondents' motives (e.g., low self-esteem, low acceptance of authority) to underestimate others' competencies. The results of the present study at any rate underline the importance of assessing leaders' emotional competencies not only through self-ratings but also by looking at how their employees perceive them. To control for the measurement issues just mentioned, future studies might collect Self and Other ratings using a longitudinal design and/or a time-sampling approach.
As regards the effects of the training Tremints on discrepancies between leaders' self evaluation of their own EI, and their employees' one, i.e., discrepancies between Self-Others evaluations, the results showed that after leaders were trained (Time 2) the number of incongruent self- versus others-rated competence evaluations decreased from 12 to 10, i.e., the training contributed to reduce the LEI evaluation gap. Although judging herself in a more favorable light (than warranted) may be useful for a leader’s self-esteem (and it might positively impact on her leadership), a self-enhancing evaluation also implies that the leader is not aware of her actual strengths and weaknesses, implying in turn that her relationship (and behavior) with her employees is based on partially wrong assumptions. Our study suggests that training leaders' emotional awareness contributes to help them improve their leadership (as it is reflected in the evaluations of their employees), possibly because it helps leaders to better focus on and understand the how and why of their subordinates' perception. The study thus confirmed hypothesis H1b, i.e., that differences between ECI-Self and ECI-Others decrease in the experimental group at Time 2, post training. However, as the study sample at Time 2 was quite small, future studies are necessary to replicate the results, i.e., to test whether the benefits observed in this study generalize to samples including a larger number of leader-employees dyads in a variety of work settings.
4.2. Effects of Training on Emotional Competencies The results of our study showed that leaders who underwent the training perceived themselves as more proficient mediators, better able to handle conflicts within the organization - supporting hypothesis H2a. These results are congruent with those of a previous study with a younger population (career-starters), in which experimental participants - trained using a longer version of Tremints evaluated - evaluated (on the ECI-Self measure) their pre- and post-training EI competencies (Kafetsios & Zammuner, 2005). In that study, however, the training had a more pervasive effect, namely, participants reported a post-training improvement in four more emotional competencies (Initiative, Trustworthiness, Inspirational leadership, and Teamwork & collaboration) in addition to Conflict management as found in the present study. The greater training impact observed in in Kafetsios & Zammuner (2005) study might be explained by thinking that older adults, with respect to younger ones, have a greater resistance to change (possibly due to greater introspection, and reflection efforts, over emotional aspects associated with their role), or, more
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simply, it might have been due the greater length (and variety) of the training program in that study. Although further studies are necessary to better define the impact of Tremints in its various versions and on samples of different ages and occupational background and role, it is worthwhile noting that a recent study by Verzeletti et al. (2012) with young adults showed that the 14-exercises Tremints version used in the present study induced the experimental group participants, women in particular, to increase their reliance on effective emotion regulation and coping strategies, and, vice versa, to decrease their use of less effective strategy types, and it did so independently of participants’ type of work (e.g., intellectual versus commercial work). Therefore, the hypothesis that older adults might be more resistant to change is plausible and worth pursuing in future studies.
As regards whether emotional competencies as perceived by others increase after the training (hypothesis H2b), the study showed that after the training employees' judged their leaders as more capable of providing client assistance (with respect to pre-training evaluations). Furthermore, four more emotional competencies (Trustworthiness, Organizational awareness, Developing others and Teamwork & collaboration) tended to obtain higher scores.
Altogether, the results give back the image of a leader who, after the training, sees herself as more able to handle conflicts within the organization and is seen by her employees as a person who better understands the needs of her clients and colleagues and acts to satisfy them. Moreover, she tends to be perceived as a boss who is able to create a climate of trust by her recognizing and rewarding others' contributions and by understanding the emotional currents within the organization. The present results are coherent with previous ones (Kafetsios & Zammuner, 2005) showing that the training induced an improvement in skills belonging to ECI Social Competence cluster, suggesting that such emotional skills are most salient in the working context. To better account for the results in our study, we might also hypothesize that other EI-competence changes did occur in leaders (in addition to the significant ones listed above), but such changes were at the individual or job-type level - failing to reach significance at the group level considering the small size and heterogeneity of our study sample, and the fact that job types differ for the specific skills they need (Goleman, 1998). Furthermore, EI training effects may be mitigated, or on the contrary increased, by several other factors that were not considered in this study - e.g., individual (e.g., openness to experience), job (e.g., emotional labor), and organizational (e.g., degree of change) ones, as argued by McEnrue, Groves and Shen (2006). Further experimental studies that take into account such variables are thus necessary.
4.3. Effects of Training on Employees' Job Involvement and Life Satisfaction Turning to the last issue that was addressed by our study, i.e., whether employees' level of involvement with their job and of satisfaction with their life are related to their leaders' EI and modified by its training (hypothesis H3), the study results showed that, at baseline, employees' Job Involvement and Life Satisfaction were not associated with their leader's self-perceived emotional intelligence, whereas they did correlate with how employees perceived her. The findings of previous studies (Wong & Law, 2002; Kafetsios et. al., 2010), namely that leaders' self-perceived EI correlate with employees' job-related variables, are therefore not replicated in our study. The fact that others' evaluations of leaders' EI were not taken into account in these two previous studies, and the difference in the used measures (i.e., ECI, a 72-item scale in our study, versus WLEIS, a 16-item scale measuring four EI skills used in the quoted studies), might accounted for this discrepancy. Our results, furthermore, might help explain Kafetsios et al. (2010) findings that leaders' self-reported abilities (on the WLEIS scale) had unexpected relationships with employees' outcomes. i.e., leaders' ability to perceive their own and others' emotions was unrelated to employees' job satisfaction and both positive ands negative affect, whereas leaders' ability to regulate their own emotions correlated positively with employees' negative affect, and their ability to use emotions in self-motivation correlated negatively with it: our study suggests that such absence of significant relationships, and the observed negative correlations might be due to
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employees' perception of their leaders' abilities, likely to differ from that leaders' self-evaluations. Our study, in sum, strongly suggests that in determining employees' job-related variables it is not enough to consider leaders' self-perceived emotional competencies; it is necessary, instead, to investigate how emotional skills are perceived by their employees.
Our study further showed that training leaders' emotional intelligence contributes to improve their employees' job involvement, as we had expected (H3). Leaders' training did not instead affect employees' life satisfaction. We might argue that the latter result does not truly invalidate the training-benefits hypothesis if we consider that a person’s wellbeing is only partially linked to her working activity. Thus, a somewhat better leadership in the employee’s work context may not be a sufficiently powerful factor to influence her wellbeing in general.
4.4. Implications This study provides some useful indications on the role of leaders' emotional intelligence in small working groups. First, our study indicates that a leader needs to be aware that how she self-perceives her competencies does not always correspond to her employees' judgments, confirming the need, as often stressed in the literature, to create a better emotional awareness in leaders because of the complex relationship that exists between emotions and working life. Helping leaders become aware of such potential discrepancies would be in itself a very important task for the organization. Second, our study showed that even a short and self-administered training program that is focused on specific emotional skills can help leaders develop such greater emotional awareness. Thus organizations might try and aim for such training efforts. Third, the study showed that training leaders' emotional intelligence enhances their employees' Job involvement, possibly because the improvement of leaders' EI is likely to result, via the greater congruency between leaders' self-perceptions and employees' evaluations, in a better work setting. Thus, by helping leaders develop a greater emotional awareness organizations can induce positive outcomes in their employees' wellbeing.
4.5. Conclusion This study, given its method - especially its experimental design that included a control group - offers, we believe, an important contribution to better understand some of the issues related to leaders' skills (and leadership style), and their impact on the organizational climate, i.e., on employees' variables.
First of all, this study is in many respects the first to test an EI-training program on an older population of leaders (mean age: 45 years). Most previous studies focused in fact on quite young leaders, with participants’ age varying from about 20 to 30 years at most, with two partial exceptions, namely the studies of Slaski & Cartwright (2003) and Cherniss et al. (2010). Participants in Slaski & Cartwright had a mean age of 37, whereas those in Cherniss et al. were a quite heterogeneous sample, varying in age from 20 to 50 years (but 45% of them fell in the 40-50 age range). Our study, therefore, focused on an age bracket that needs to be paid due attention in that it may be considered quite typical for the leader role within many organizations, possibly more so than the very ‘young’ age bracket.
Second, whereas experimental studies with other population kinds (e.g. Zins et. al., 2007, with children; Kafetsios & Zammuner, 2005, and Verzeletti et al., 2012, with young adults) were carried out and obtained positive results, studies testing whether an ‘older’ population can be trained, assessing at the same time whether the training obtains positive employee outcomes related to the organizational context (e.g., changes in job involvement and employees’ perception of their leaders’ competences) were still lacking. Our study, therefore, contributes to fill in this gap.
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Third, our study showed not only that emotional competencies can be effectively improved, thus confirming previous findings in the literature (e.g., Slaski &Cartwright, 2003; Nelis et al., 2009), but also that even a relatively short and self-administered training can be effective to that purpose. This is an important result if we consider, as discussed in the Introduction, that training programs are typically very costly and their results often dependent on the trainer's personality, charisma and skills.
Fourth, the study results confirmed the main assumption that guided the design of our study, namely that to better understand leaders' ability to influence the organizational climate it is necessary to take into account the psychological and emotional components of the ‘dyad’ formed by a leader and her employees. Among the most important results were the findings that, whereas leaders' self-perceptions of their emotional skills are initially (before the training) discrepant with their employees’ perception of them and are unrelated to employees' variables, the changes induced by the leaders' training are noticed not only in self-perceptions, but also in employees’ perception of their leader’s post-training emotional skills and do affect employees' level of job involvement.
The study has some clear limitations too. In particular, it must be considered a pilot-study given the low number of participants, especially at Time 2, i.e., after the training (when there was the withdrawal of some participants). The small sample size surely has conditioned the obtained results. Furthermore, the study did not have a control group of leaders who self-rated their emotional skills. Both these limitations should be overcome in future studies.
To conclude, this study, especially considering that its sample included various types of organization, and types of leaders’ and employees’ work, might provide useful indications, to organizations seeking to establish a better organizational climate that enhances employees' commitment, on the effects of leaders' emotional intelligence in the functioning of small working groups and on its training. Our results on the one hand, in line with the literature confirmed the leader's key-role in determining the organizational climate and underlined the need to help leaders develop a better emotional awareness, on the other hand showed that the use of appropriate, carefully developed EI training procedures (even self-administered ones, whose results are independent from trainers' personality, charisma or skills) does help leaders become more emotionally aware and, as a result, contributes to improve employees' involvement in their job.
Acknowledgements.
This study was founded by a grant of Fondazione CARIPARO to V. L. Zammuner. We wish to express our warmest thanks to Chiara Verzeletti for her help in data analyses, Stefano Andriolo for the online-measures administration, and Elisa Bernardello for her contribution in monitoring online participation in the study.
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