Abstract:

The importance and the role of emotions in the work setting have received in recent years an increasing attention, as regards both those experienced by individuals as a function of job or role characterstics, and those related to work-setting structural issues, such as the emotions that employees feel towards their leaders, and vice versa, according to leaders' emotional capabilities, and to leadership style.

The present study, with an experimental pre-post design that included an experimental group formed by 25 leaders and their 77 employees, and a control group of 4 leaders and 12 employees, most of whom were hospital employees in various sanitary units, tested whether Self-reported leaders' emotional capabilities, especially their emotional intelligence (LEI), are congruent with Other-reported LEI, and whether a brief self-administered training program (Tremints; Zammuner, 2010) would affect self- and other-reported LEI, as well as a variety of emotion-related aspects in leaders' employees, i.e., their Job involvement, Job satisfaction, Life satisfaction, Health level, and felt Affect, as well in leaders' own perception of their emotional abilities, including preferred strategies of emotion regulation and adhesion to display rules of emotion, and felt affect, health level, and job involvement. The study design was as follows. At Time 1, leaders of both groups, as well as their employees, filled in the various measures mentioned above, including the Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI; Boyatzis, Goleman, & Rhee, 2000) and the WLEIS scale of emotional intelligence. Leaders filled in the Self-reported versions of ECI and WLEIS; employees filled in the Other-reported versions, i.e., rated their leader. All employees and leaders also evaluated aspects of their well-being in relation to work, such as their Job involvement, Life satisfaction, Health level. At Time 2 (after the experimental-group leaders had undergone a brief training of their emotional capabilities), leaders and employees of both the experimental- and the control-group, again rated LEI and both leasers and their employees evaluated their own well-being in terms of Job involvement, Life satisfaction, etc. The results overall showed a significant although limited 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. For instance, most well-being measures (e.g., employees' job satisfaction) increased for employees after their leaders' training; likewise, leaders' own well-being measures increased after their training. Such increases were not generally observed in the control group. Most emotional sub-skills measured by ECI correlated positively with well-being measures for both leaders and employees of the experimental group at T2 (post-training); such correlations were rare for the control group.

The study results - although limited by the small sample size of the control group - confirm the hypotheses that: leaders' emotional capabilities LEI are often rated in different ways by leaders and their employees; LEI influence leaders' employees well-being; LEI can be improved after even a short, self-administered online training; leaders' own and employees' evaluation of LEI become more similar after leaders' training.

Keywords:

Emotional Intelligence, Emotion expression, Leadership, Training, Self- and Others-perceptions, Job Involvement, Life Satisfaction, Health, Affect.