Assessing and training leaders’ emotional intelligence, and testing its influence on leaders’ employees

Recent literature places emotions at the center of leadership construed as a dynamic pro- cess. The present study, with an experimental pre–post design that included an experimental group formed by leaders and their employ- ees, and a control group of employees whose leaders were not assessed, tested whether self-reported leaders’ emotional intelligence (LEI) is congruent with other-reported LEI, and whether a brief self-administered train- ing program affects self- and other-reported LEI assessment, as well as job involvement and life satisfaction, in leaders’ employees. At Time 1, leaders in the experimental group and employees in both the experimental and the control groups completed the Emotional Com- petence Inventory (ECI; Boyatzis et al., 2000) – leaders completed the self-reported version; employees completed the other-reported ver- sion, i.e., rated their leaders. All employees evaluated their own job involvement and life satisfaction. At Time 2 (after training experi- mental group leaders), experimental group leaders and both experimental and control group employees again rated LEI using the ECI; all employees also evaluated their own job involvement and life satisfaction. The results show a significant effect of the train- ing on Time 2 measures in the experimental group, both on self- and other-reported LEI assessments, and on employees’ outcomes. In particular, Time 2 showed an increase in lead- ers’ ECI self-assessed conf lict management and other-assessed service orientation com- petences, and in employees’ job involvement. The study indicates overall that training lead- ers for emotional intelligence can diminish the discrepancy between self- and other-reported LEI assessments, and increase employees’ pos- itive outcomes.