Components of Emotional Intelligence for Health Professionals

Discuss About The Leadership Management Health Professionals.

Emotional intelligence can be defined as the ability by which a working professional is able to identify as well as manage his own emotions as well as emotions of others (Tyczkowski et al., 2015). Three important skills are needed by individuals to develop emotional intelligence in workplace. These are the development of emotional awareness, the ability to manage emotions successfully and the capability to harness proper emotions thereby applying them to different tasks like proper thinking, problem solving as well as decision-making (Nigtingale et al., 2018) . Emotional intelligence helps individuals to regulate their own emotions as well as cheering up or helping people in calming down and many others. In the field of nursing as well, emotional intelligence is of great benefit as it helps in maintain a workplace where there are fewer conflicts, more understanding and smooth workflow among all the staff members (Spano-Azekely et al., 2016). This in turn will have a positive impact not only on the bonds among the employees but will also have positive outcomes on the health of patients. This assignment will therefore be based on the impact of emotional intelligence on nursing profession and how they are helping in the undisrupted workflow of healthcare organizations. It will show the importance of emotional importance on nursing leadership, its impact on nursing leadership, level of pyramid that requires the skill, strength and weakness of emotional intelligence, ways to develop emotional intelligence and others.

Goleman has developed a model of emotional intelligence that has five important components. The first important component that every working professional should develop in them is self-awareness. Researchers are of the opinion that individuals who have high level of self-awareness can easily understand their own strengths as well as weakness. It also involves how individual actions of professionals affect others (Chang et al., 2017). It has been seen in different research studies that those individuals who have emotional self-awareness are highly receptive and can learn from different types of constrictive criticism in comparisons to those who do not have emotional self-awareness. Another important component of emotional intelligence as stated by Goleman is self-regulation. Researchers have stated that it is indeed an important trait as this trait helps individuals to develop the capability of exercise restraint as well as control their expressions of their emotions (Tyczkowski et al., 2015). Motivation is yet another factor that helps individuals to work beyond their capability to bring out positive outcomes for clients or for their organizations. Researchers are of the opinion that those working professionals who are self-motivated as well as resilient and have inner ambition tend to be more dedicated for their work in comparison to others who are influenced by different outside forces such as money and prestige (Powell et al., 2015). When persons are driven be self-motivation and ambition, they will tend to work beyond their expectation and will have an inner thirst for success in their career. Moreover, empathy is yet another component.  A person who is empathetic will have higher level of compassion and will be able to connect emotionally with others. They can genuinely respond to concerns of other people that help in developing bonds and relationships that have positive relationship with productivity (Karimi et al., 2014). Social skills are the fifth component by which employees can develop and build trust with other people. Such people are also seen to gain respect from other in the workplace that thereby help in developing a collaborative environment to work.

Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Nursing Profession

There is a huge importance of emotional intelligence for the nursing leaders in healthcare sectors. The nursing profession expects the nursing professionals to develop themselves with skills by which they can interact with patients, medical fraternity as well as healthcare staffs successfully. Development of nurse patient relationship can be considered as one of the main perspective of healthcare services (Foster et al., 2015). This interaction among the different members is not simply conversation but involves different nursing perceptions, understanding of the emotions of patients and team members and proper utilization of the different perceptions for proper management of different patient situations for providing effective patient care. Therefore, researchers have stated that the concept of emotional intelligence in the domain of nursing has become successful not only on social level but also on the professional level. With the help of emotional intelligence, nursing professionals can ensure development of emotional capabilities by which they develop care plans for the patients that include respecting patient’s preferences and inhibitions without causing their own cultural biasness in their actions and body language. Nurses can successfully oblige to the emotional, social as well as spiritual needs of patients with proper use of strengths of their emotional capabilities and skills (Al-Hamdam et al., 2017). With the development of bio-psycho-social model of care in the present generation that overrides the concept of only biological determiners affecting health, emotional intelligence has become important attribute for nurses. This is mainly because nurses need to analyze the psychosocial as well as social determinants of the patients’ health and in order to gather the information, nurses need to communicate and establish bonds and trust with the patients. Therefore, the five skills of emotional intelligence are of the extremely importance helping nursing leaders to be competent in their communication skills, management of work pressures, effectively leading multi-disciplinary teams, management of conflict resolutions , effective maintenance of ethical guidelines and others (Prufetta, 2017). Nurse leaders need to know that every patient are unique and their approach of treatment should be different accordingly on the need of the patients therefore, nurses need to be flexible with their emotions when they will be handling various issues of lives of patients.  They also need to have varied levels of understanding and withstanding capabilities for active self-introspection of events, psychological understanding of patients, assessment of events and many others. Therefore, emotional intelligence helps them to handle all the activities if ways by which they bring out successful results (Burnett &Pettijohn, 2015).

Emotional Intelligence and Managerial Pyramid in Nursing Profession

According to the managerial pyramid, leaders or managers can be subdivided into several sections with the topmost manager in nursing being called the chief nursing officer. This is the followed by the departmental managers and then the nurse managers. Following them are the charge nurses and the floor nurses who do not come in managerial positions. Among the levels of managers, nurse managers are the main level of hierarchy who requires the highest level of emotional intelligence (Codier et al., 2014). They contribute to the respective departments by leading and managing the huge number of nurses on the floor (where they have to not only look and monitor the health of the patient and the activities of nurses but) and solving solve nursing personnel issues, planning work shifts of nurses, ensuring adequate nursing, educating staffs and liaising with physicians and nurses. Therefore, they are the persons who need to have high level of emotional intelligence for proper management of the huge staffs and other members of higher authorities besides patients.

Leaders are individuals who undertake the responsibility of motivating his team members and communicating with them in ways by which they can guide the members towards the zenith of success and thereby meeting organization mission and vision. In the field of nursing profession, clinical nurse leaders are assigned the duty of designing, implementing as well as evaluating the care of the client by effective coordination, delegation and supervision of the care conducted by the subordinates of the healthcare team. In the modern generation, transformational leadership is preferred in most organizations where the leaders need to possess not only high standards if professionalism and ever-ending diligence but have exceptional communicational skills and effective interpersonal skills (Fujino et al., 2015). Nurses also need to have the capabilities of developing strong bonds with employees based on trust and mutual understanding. In this way only, leaders can help their embers not to be affected by workload but in turn motivate them to work beyond their abilities for the humanity. Leaders also need to have empathetic disposition not only with the patients but also with the team members and handle their concerns, issues and problems with genuine emotions and compassion. This makes employees feel loved and respected by organization that reduces job stress and turnover in organizations (Taylor et al., 2015). Moreover, leaders who are having good sense of humor and can apply such skills in difficult situations can help employees mitigate stressful situations and overcome crucial barriers with elements of fun and humor. All these would be only possible when the leaders are able to develop emotional intelligence successfully.

Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Leadership Management of Health Professionals

Healthcare leaders who do not have emotional intelligence are seen to fail miserably in ‘connecting’ with their team members that result in development of emotional distance between the leaders and subordinates. This emotional distance result in development of detachment of the employees with the leaders by which the achievement of the goals become difficult and collaborative work output cannot be received. Nursing subordinates feel helpless when they cannot discuss their emotional turmoil, crisis period and concerns with their leaders or managers. This results in poor work satisfaction and hence increased turnover (Prufeta, 2017). Nurses are easily burnt out for which they may make different types of errors in patient treatment affecting the latter’s’ lives. Bonds and trust are never developed for which both productivity and smooth workflow get affected.

Nurse leaders can develop their emotional intelligence by working with therapists or counselors and learning to manage their expectations for effective controlling of feelings or rejection as well as anger. They can also use stress reduction techniques to decrease stress, cultivating more understanding of their own emotions and learning assertive communication techniques (Powell, Mabry & Mixer, 2015). They also need to develop strong listening skills and increase emotional intelligence. They can also go through evidence-based papers to develop their skills of emotional intelligence.

Conclusion

From the above discussion, it becomes quite clear that emotional intelligence is an integral part of nursing mangers and leaders that help them to maintain their subordinates effectively. Leaders have high emotional intelligence when they have high self-awareness, self-regulation, social skills, motivation, empathy and communication. All these attributes are extremely important for developing trust among the members of the team. Proper development of relationships can be ensured when leaders communicate with members with empathy and compassion. They feel respected and job satisfaction is high. Nurse can overcome pressures and turnover is reduced. All these factors not only ensure smooth workflow but also ensure high patient safety and patient satisfaction. This helps in meeting organizational mission effectively.

References:

Al?Hamdan, Z., Oweidat, I. A., Al?Faouri, I., &Codier, E. (2017, January). Correlating Emotional intelligence and job performance among jordanian hospitals’ registered nurses. In Nursing forum (Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 12-20).

Burnett, M., &Pettijohn, C. (2015). Investigating the efficacy of mind-body therapies and emotional intelligence on worker stress in an organizational setting: An experimental approach. Journal of Organizational Culture, Communications and Conflict, 19(1), 146.

Chang, B. P., Vacanti, J. C., Michaud, Y., Flanagan, H., &Urman, R. D. (2017). Emotional intelligence in the operating room: analysis from the Boston Marathon bombing. American journal of disaster medicine, 9(2), 77-85.

Codier, E., & Odell, E. (2014). Measured emotional intelligence ability and grade point average in nursing students. Nurse Education Today, 34(4), 608-612.

Foster, K., McCloughen, A., Delgado, C., Kefalas, C., & Harkness, E. (2015). Emotional intelligence education in pre-registration nursing programmes: An integrative review. Nurse Education Today, 35(3), 510-517.

Fujino, Y., Tanaka, M., Yonemitsu, Y., & Kawamoto, R. (2015). The relationship between characteristics of nursing performance and years of experience in nurses with high emotional intelligence. International journal of nursing practice, 21(6), 876-881.

Karimi, L., Leggat, S. G., Donohue, L., Farrell, G., & Couper, G. E. (2014). Emotional rescue: The role of emotional intelligence and emotional labour on well?being and job?stress among community nurses. Journal of advanced nursing, 70(1), 176-186.

Nightingale, S., Slade, P., Sheen, K., &Spiby, H. (2018). Emotional intelligence and caring in health care professionals. International Journal of Nursing Studies.

Powell, K. R., Mabry, J. L., & Mixer, S. J. (2015). Emotional intelligence: A critical evaluation of the literature with implications for mental health nursing leadership. Issues in mental health nursing, 36(5), 346-356.

Prufeta, P. (2017). Emotional intelligence of nurse managers: an exploratory study. Journal of Nursing Administration, 47(3), 134-139.

Spano-Szekely, L., Griffin, M. T. Q., Clavelle, J., & Fitzpatrick, J. J. (2016). Emotional intelligence and transformational leadership in nurse managers. Journal of Nursing Administration, 46(2), 101-108.

Taylor, B., Roberts, S., Smyth, T., & Tulloch, M. (2015). Nurse managers’ strategies for feeling less drained by their work: an action research and reflection project for developing emotional intelligence. Journal of nursing management, 23(7), 879-887.

Tyczkowski, B., Vandenhouten, C., Reilly, J., Bansal, G., Kubsch, S. M., &Jakkola, R. (2015). Emotional intelligence (EI) and nursing leadership styles among nurse managers. Nursing administration quarterly, 39(2), 172-180.