Self-awareness and emotional intelligence

Discuss about the Journal Of Behavioral And the Applied Management.

Self-awareness of an individual constitutes of a profound sense of the personal preferences, biases and the sentiments and the way they influence the attributes of a person along with his decision making power. Self-awareness is perceived by very few people, with the greater percentage having it lurking it in their subconscious mind. However, emotional intelligence of a person requires the information that a person gathers as a consequence of their self-awareness.

Self-awareness is particularly important for cultivating leadership quality in a person (Carson, Carson and Birkenmeier, 2016). Leaders who lack self-awareness take decisions without apprehending the after effects of the decision. Some particular characteristic traits of people who lack self-awareness are:

• Taking decisions that serve self-interest rather than the interest of the community to which the person belongs
• Do not favours others’ questioning their decisions and activities
• Lack the power of improvisation and accepting feedback
• Sparse realisation of the ways in which their decisions affect others

People who have strong emotional intelligence always consider the impact of their actions on others. Hence all distinguished executive leaders are supposed to be people in possession of high level of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 2017).

Emotional intelligence however deals with three aspects of human conscience. The emotional side of a person how they behave with others in a particular situation. Hence, it can be concluded that being conscious of own emotional state is very important. However it is challenging also. Emotions change every moment depending on the emotion stimuli that is constantly feeding our consciousness. People experience more than one emotions at a single moment.

Thirdly, a high emotional state puts a person high on testosterone (Joseph et al. 2015). At that state it becomes very difficult to be aware of own emotions, their causative agents, and controlling them becomes impossible.

The ability of a person to control his or her emotions is termed as emotional quotient (EQ). It is beyond human nature to remain unmoved in every situation. However, the awareness of the situation and control over the nerves make a person able to combat with the emotion and exhibit less of it. In this regard, the impact of negative emotions deserves mention. Feelings like anger, ignorance, avoidance or frustration are most likely to rive people out of their wits. A leadership skill can be discussed in this regard (Derks, Westerhof & Bohlmeijer, 2016). In case if the member of a team gives sarcastic reply to the enquiry of a senior, it must not be perceived as his or her desperation. Rather, I feel that questioning skills should be utilised to discover underlying facts that finds expression in his behaviour. It might be that the employee’s sincerities, key skills or dedication have gone unnoticed and it is his or her way of catching the limelight.

Team and group work

Group is a word with a broader significance. I might say that a group of passengers are travelling in the same flight. However, they are not out for a common cause.  At best, I would define a group as an arbitrary cohesion of entities.

On the contrary, I feel that a team has a deeper in-stress that combines the entities of the same team members. The fellows who are on my side on the football filed comprise a football team and certainly not a football group. The cause of winning a match comprises of mutual interest of all the players in our team.

A group of people is accumulated by virtue of a circumstance (for example sharing the common carpool) and is bound to share a common platform in spite of their individual goal being different (Raluca, & Romulus, 2015). Therefore I feel, working in a group helps in self-revelation. My office workgroup is a space which provides me the chance of exhibiting my own strengths and weaknesses. My colleagues share the same interest, however they do not have any mutual interest.

However, I feel that teams are a composition of individuals who have common preferences and attitude, and on most cases work towards fulfilling a common goal. Teams impact our personal lives also (Schouten, van den Hooff and Feldberg, 2016). In our personal lives also, we work to fulfil other team member’s interests, who hold a very important place in our life.

In my opinion team work provides the most feasible chance of interdependent tasking. However, it is very essential to create a strong team to initiate teamwork. While working in a team, I feel that the most important and the foremost step is mutual problem solving (Davidson, Major and Michaelsen, 2014) The contribution of each team member’s unique advice and suggestion leads to finding the best possible solution to any problem (Paul, He & Dennis, 2018). Individual multi-tasking slows down the work rate. However, a team performance helps in accomplishing the task faster by diving the task among members with equal abilities.

In the complex society of the modern times, conflict situations are most common. I have deeply studied the modern organisational structure to find out some potential causes of conflict. They are:

1. Competition to acquire resources
2. Conflict from confusion over responsibility and liability in a workplace
3. Conflict arising from different in attitude and communication gap.
4. Interdependence upon the members of the same team often causes conflict
5. Complex incentive structure often gives rise to discontent and a sense of inferiority among the team members

Hence, it is easy to ascertain that conflict resolution is very important for meeting any organisational goals (Davidson, Major and Michaelsen, 2014). I have observed that many organisational authorities dread conflicts in the workspace. Generally, they adopt the strategies of biasness or implies divisionary politics upon the conflicting employees. At best, when conflicts become impossible to resolve, leaders often become disoriented to the problem and sneak out of the situation advising the conflicting people to resolve it among themselves. I personally advise having an organisational culture that have the facility of submitting feedbacks. Submission of constructive, advisory and truthful feedbacks can be of significant help in resolving conflicts. In this way if the employees vent out the issues that they face in the workplace through feedbacks, negative sentiments would not grow in them. I feel that it is essential to let know if I feel offended or hurt with the particular activity or speech of any other team member.

Negotiation and conflict management

Therefore it can be opined that negotiation is the best means of avoiding conflict. Along with negotiation I always give equal prominence to negotiation planning. Wrong step towards negotiation can initiate the alter ego of the opponent. I always analyse whether the negotiation is a win-win or a win-loss situation for both negotiators.

According to me the both parties should try to achieve a win-win situation at first. The best way to implement win-win negotiation is conflict management through collaboration (Prenzel . & Vanclay, 2014). Avoidance of the issues leads to mutual loss. I have found the strategy particularly important in cost management. Collaboration between conflicting parties can help to bring down costs rather than entangle into a conflict and raise question over each other’s liabilities.

Intercultural communication is fostered from the increasing importance of improving relationships among colleagues. Debarring ethnicity, cultural differences or linguistic variations, it is essential to communicate with each other in a workplace or institution. I support some fundamental aspects of Interculturalism that I feel should prevail in a multi-cultural community. The first in the list is the need to main a positive and collaborative attitude (Prenzel & Vanclay, 2014). I suppose the members pertaining to dominant culture in a workspace or classroom should understand the ways to communicate with the members of inferior culture. The next most important aspect is understanding and respecting diversity.

It is essential that the workers belonging to dominant cultures should learn to respect the ethnic, cultural and religious norms of the people of other culture. People should know that members of each community bring along with them their ethics, culture and unique behavioural traits. People should be tolerant towards them as long as they do not harm the popular sentiments through their perceptions or activities (Ladegaard & Jenks, 2015) .

However, I feel active participation is another important step towards intercultural communication. I feel that experienced and senior members of a community should take the charge of introducing with the immigrating employees or students or members. Members who are new and belong to a different culture generally shoe the tendency to stay aloof from the other employees. Other members or colleagues have to play the role of driving them out of their shell and accepting them as equally integral parts of the organisation or association.

The last thing that people should remember in an environment of mixed culture is that they should avoid racism and discriminatory policies. Every organisation or institution should have their own anti-discriminatory policies. This would discourage the associated people from engaging racism and conduct discriminatory behaviour with others.

Reference List

Baker, W., 2015. Research into practice: Cultural and intercultural awareness. Language Teaching, 48(1), pp.130-141.

Carson, K.D., Carson, P.P. and Birkenmeier, B.J., 2016. Measuring emotional intelligence: Development and validation of an instrument. Journal of Behavioral and applied Management, 2(1).

Davidson, N., Major, C.H. and Michaelsen, L.K., 2014. Small-group learning in higher education—cooperative, collaborative, problem-based, and team-based learning: an introduction by the guest editors. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(3&4), pp.1-6.

Derks, Y.P.M.J., Westerhof, G.J. and Bohlmeijer, E.T., 2016. A meta-analysis on the association between emotional awareness and borderline personality pathology. Journal of personality disorders, 30, pp.1-23.

Goleman, D., 2017. Leadership That Gets Results (Harvard Business Review Classics). Harvard Business Press.

Helms, W.S. and Oliver, C., 2015. Radical settlements to conflict: Conflict management and its implications for institutional change. Journal of Management & Organization, 21(4), pp.471-494.

Joseph, D.L., Jin, J., Newman, D.A. and O’boyle, E.H., 2015. Why does self-reported emotional intelligence predict job performance? A meta-analytic investigation of mixed EI. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(2), p.298.

Language and intercultural communication in the workplace: critical approaches to theory and practice. Language and Intercultural Communication, 15(1), pp.1-12.

Paul, S., He, F. and Dennis, A.R., 2018, January. Group Atmosphere, Shared Understanding, and Team Conflict in Short Duration Virtual Teams. In Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Prenzel, P.V. and Vanclay, F., 2014. How social impact assessment can contribute to conflict management. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 45, pp.30-37.

Raluca, Z. and Romulus, V., 2015. Informal Groups in Global Work Environment: Group Work or Team Work?. organization, 6, p.114.

Schouten, A.P., van den Hooff, B. and Feldberg, F., 2016. Virtual team work: Group decision making in 3D virtual environments. Communication Research, 43(2), pp.180-210.