Emotional intelligence is the individual's ability to recognize, understand, and manage one's own emotions and to influence the emotions of others. In an organization, the leaders connect emotionally with the employees for the organization's success, growth, sustainability, and development. After the COVID-19 pandemic, effective leadership comes more into action where leaders need to understand, regulate self and others' emotions, and act accordingly for organizational change, development, growth, transformation, and sustainability. The study aims to provide insights into emotional intelligence and effective leadership using bibliometric techniques on 403 Scopus-indexed articles from 2012-2022. The study depicts performance analysis, intellectual structure, and thematic structure of emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness. The results highlighted the publication trends, themes and derives future research trends by showcasing the role of emotional intelligence in effective leadership for shaping the future of the work.
Top1. Introduction
Emotional intelligence (EI) is equally important for both an institute and for an individual It holds a special position in the communication process for the organization and its employees (Yao et al., 2019). Salovey and Mayer (1990, p. 189) defined EI as “the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions”. Goleman (2012), defined EI as “the ability of individuals to recognize others and their own feelings and to manage these emotions”. For an individual EI impacts satisfaction towards life, career development, work engagement, and an individual’s relationship with peers and friends. For an organization, EI adds to job satisfaction, employee role, performance, and commitment towards the firm. Motivational EI and work-related EI (Bacon & Corr, 2017; Krishnakumar et al., 2017) help people in dealing with emotions and express feelings comfortably. Individuals noticed the emotions, differentiated them from each other, and further managed these emotions by encapsulating EI (Mayer & Salovey, 1990).
According to Mayer et al. (2001), EI is divided into four approaches “the emotional perception, emotional assimilation, emotional comprehension, and the management of the individual’s own emotions. The first approach involves the correct identification, expression, and differentiation of emotions; the second approach expresses emotion-based thinking, directing attention to important information; the third approach indicates the ability to recognize feelings between words and emotions and the last approach is the management of the individual’s own emotions.”
Job satisfaction, career success, and healthy relationships are experienced by individuals with higher EI (Schutte et al., 2007). EI affects individual behavior and possesses a positive relationship with stress and job dissatisfaction (Lee & Ok, 2012). EI affects one’s ability to cope with environmental demands and pressures (Shi et al., 2014). Employees with high EI are more satisfied with their jobs, more committed towards their workplace (D’amato and Herzfeldt, 2008) and easily adapt to the work environment (Rozell et al., 2014).
Effective term is added to the quality of the leaders only when they have the power to influence employees in achieving organizational goals (Bodinson, 2005; Vardiman et al., 2006). The emotional competency of effective leader is attained when leader possess the characteristic to handle stress, increase the job outcomes (Rajah et al., 2011). Amagoh (2009) emphasized on the contextual factors to nurture and sustain effective leadership in person.