The concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has captured the imaginations of educational as well as business professionals in recent years. The basic task of leaders is to create good feelings in those they lead. These good feelings or positive emotions bring out the best in people by causing them to become excited about the task or tasks leaders envision. Considerable emphasis is placed on the physiological underpinnings of these emotions in the primitive center of the brain, more specifically, the amygdala.
The leadership definition problem is not new, but solving it has important implications for whether one is talking about management or leadership. Many years ago Joseph Moses (1979) proposed Moses' Commandment that "Thou shalt study leaders who are first accurately identified as leaders before attempting to build theories of leadership behavior" (p. 32). He felt that leadership in the business world was scarce and that less than a quarter of the over 200,000 individuals he had helped assess at AT&T had any significant leadership skills. Bennis (1989), who wrote a brief testimonial for the dust cover of this book, identified a small group of consensus leaders and then studied them in depth.
Emotionally intelligent people have significant capabilities in two areas of personal competence and two areas of social competence. Gardner (1983) identified these two competencies as intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences respectively, so the concepts are hardly new. The personal competence areas include self-awareness and self-management. These competencies are further refined into the following nine categories: emotional self-awareness, accurate self-assessment, self-confidence, emotional self-control, transparency, adaptability, achievement, initiative, and optimism. The social competence areas are social awareness and relationship management, including the following: empathy, organizational awareness, service, inspirational leadership, influence, developing others, being a change catalyst, conflict management, building bonds, and teamwork and collaboration.
Goleman et al., (2002) present six......
