Combinative Aspects of Leadership Style and Emotional Intelligence

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the leader’s emotional intelligence influences the leader’s preferences for different ways of combining leadership behaviors (i.e. combinative aspects of leadership style). Design/methodology/approach – The authors used a hybrid design to collect the data to avoid common-method biases. The authors described a high-stress workplace in a vignette and asked participants to rank four styles of combining a task-oriented leadership (i.e. Pressure) statement and a socio-emotional leadership (i.e. Support) statement. The authors then asked participants to complete a Likert-scale based questionnaire on emotional intelligence. Findings – The authors found that leaders who prefer to provide Support immediately before Pressure have higher levels of emotional intelligence than do leaders who prefer the three other combinative styles. Leaders who prefer to provide Pressure and Support separately (i.e. provide Pressure 30 minutes after Support) have the lowest levels of emotional intelligence. Research limitations/implications – A key implicit assumption in the work is that leaders do not want to evoke negative emotions in followers. The authors did not take into account factors that influence leadership style which participating managers would be likely to encounter on a daily basis such as the relationship with the follower, the follower’s level of performance and work experience, the gender of the leader and the gender of the follower, the hierarchical levels of the leader and follower, and the followers’ preferred combinative style. The nature of the sample and the use of a hypothetical scenario are other limitations of the study. Practical implications – Providing leadership behaviors that are regarded as effective is necessary but not enough because the emotional impact of leadership behaviors appears to also depend on how the behaviors are configured. Originality/value – This is the first study to show that the emotional intelligence of leaders is related to their preferences for the manner in which they combine task and social leadership statements. Furthermore, two-factor theories of leadership propose that the effects of task and social leadership are additive. However, the findings show that the effects are interactive.

Development and validation of the team learning questionnaire

Nowadays the organizational scenario is changing in several aspects that affect organization commitment. Team learning construct has emerged as a tool to deal with these changes and the dynamic nature of this situation. Although team learning has acquired importance in recent years, instruments to measure team learning should be developed. The aim of this paper is to develop and validate a team learning scale, the Team Learning Questionnaire, attending to four dimensions of team learning: Continued Improvement Seeking, Dialogue Promotion and Open Communication, Collaborative Learning, and Strategic and Proactive Leadership that Promote Learning. Results provide evidence of the reliability and validity of the scale.