Emotional Intelligence and Leadership

The term emotional intelligence or EI refers to the ability of understanding as well as managing one’s own emotion and the others as well. People having a huge emotional intelligence degree do know what they are feeling, the meaning of their emotions and lastly how the emotions can affect the others. Emotional intelligence is helpful for the leaders to know about what the employees are feeling and how they are going to be affected by leader’s or other individuals’ emotions.

According to Elfenbein and MacCann (2017) the emotional intelligence narrows down four abilities that are necessary for leaders to adopt and practise the same in their leadership process. These abilities are: (1) Emotional perception: where the leaders are able to perceive the accurate emotional content from the external world such as facial expression or body language. (2) Emotional facilitation: where the leaders have the ability to do problem solving to aid someone’s emotion. (3) Emotional understanding: this is about the ability of understanding the emotion and lastly (4) Emotional regulations: where leaders up regulate the positive emotions and down regulate the negative one. In the following essay, two articles will be discussed in an argumentative way to discuss emotional intelligence and the effect of AI into it. The process of applying the same will also be introduced in the following as well.

Many of the researchers have argued that emotional intelligence is mainly about the understanding of the emotions of one-self as well as the others, on the other hand the facilitation of the same in order to make good progress in leadership skills. In recent times, when everything is turning into automation, there is always a chance that AI or artificial intelligence will be involved in the leadership process in order to make it a lot easier for the organisations to process and to apply the same for the effective results.

There are two journal articles which have been chosen for this particular essay to understand the statement of the authors of emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence for the leadership context.  

Authors Chamorro-Premuzic, Wade, & Jordan, (2018) stated about the best man ship in leadership through emotional intelligence. They discussed that during the time of Covid-19 pandemic the employees from different organisations were all struggling and also stressed about themselves because of the scenario. Amid everything the managers are only people who had to take the responsibility to control the situation. On the other hand manage all the resources and the procedures in order to ensure the ongoing process of the organisation. The authors stated about two networks that are involved in the process of leadership for the managers which are analytical network and empathic network. Most effective leaders  do need both of the network to perform problem solving  and decision making as well as scan the environment to make room for new ideas. In recent times, during the pandemic when everything else is being digitised automated through the technology to reach out to the remote location, leadership and emotional intelligence also has included the concept of Artificial intelligence. There is always a debate of whether artificial intelligence will replace the human workforce or not. Yes it is true that AI will genuinely replace human resources. However, the human workforce or the leaders will be able to excel in the soft skills and it is to be believed that the artificial intelligence will be helping the leaders or the managers of organisations to improve their emotional intelligence or the interpersonal communication skills (hbr.org. 2022). Authors Smith, Van Oosten & Boyatzis, (2020) have argued that it is very tempting to know that human leadership will face certain threats from the application of artificial intelligence in organisations. The purpose of applying artificial intelligence in organisations will be to replace the human workforces and make everything automated to manage the workforces.

Artificial Intelligence and Leadership

After the completion of the reading about the journals I understood how emotional intelligence plays a very important role in the leadership process which can be helpful for the organisations to achieve the objectives for the future scopes. I agree with the authors Chamorro-Premuzic, Wade, & Jordan, (2018) for the statement about the neural networks that are present in our brain: analysis network and empathy network. I observed hope the authors stated about the networks opposing one another. It is true that leaders often activate the analytical network for any action but cannot activate empathy at the same time. It is very difficult to use head and heart at the time (sciencedaily.com. 2022). As per the many of the researchers, the analytic and empathy networks are not same and they suppress each other.

As for the application of artificial intelligence for the organisation, there are so many roles present in the organisation that are handled by the leaders. However the application of artificial intelligence in the organisation will be helpful in handling such operations. For an example, I can talk about the medical industry where most of the processes are based on numbers. I believe that the help of artificial intelligence can be helpful in handling the data from the patients for the treatments. As I have previously discussed about the two kinds of networks: the analytical network and the empathy one. This analytic network among the leaders helps with the decision making and problem solving skills. Thus I can conclude that for emotional intelligence, artificial intelligence will be playing a vital role. The leaders from the medical industry can be able to take help from the analysed data from artificial intelligence for the right kind of decision making as well as the problem solving process as well. I think even after replacing human resources, artificial intelligence can be beneficial for the human workforce to make decisions for understanding, motivating and interacting with the employees with better soft skills and capabilities for remote working as well.   

In the recent pandemic every organisation started thinking about providing utmost safety and security while leading to a remote working culture. Thus in every organisation, the managers started practising the virtual teams in order to keep the pace of the operation as it is. While researching the same I came across various kinds of researchers where they have mentioned about the troubles regarding managing and leading the teams on the virtual platforms (Khan and Khan, 2018). I observed that the face to face conversation or social interaction were less which affected the leaders a lot to manage or lead the team. I think in building trust and interaction in the virtual teams, emotional intelligence plays a vital role which helps the leaders at work collaboratively as well. With the help of Emotional intelligence or EI, I have observed that positive change started taking place such as understanding the empathy or communication among the peers as well (Cole, Cox and Stavros, 2019). According to my learning, EI helps in making improvements in building up the culture to reach the common goals with proper effectiveness. On the other hand, Artificial intelligence contributes a lot in tackling the virtual team. As I have previously mentioned, collaboration and communication is one of the most challenging things for the team leaders to process and to operate. However the application of AI has been helpful enough to establish the right kind of communication through various kinds of digital platforms for the communication purpose. Align with the communication the AI also helps with the data analysis or the tools such as text to speech can be used for the operations. In this way, the leaders get the chances to reduce the time and be unproductive for the errors (Microsoft.com. 2022). Moreover I can conclude that the application of Artificial intelligence is not a threat to the human workforce but it can be helpful for the leaders to establish perfect emotional intelligence to conduct operations for objectives.

Application of Artificial Intelligence in Leadership

From my personal experiences I have observed that the remote working and virtual team have a lot of disadvantages in itself which creates a lot of problems for the leaders to mitigate and establish good working performances. Thus on several occasions they are not able to meet the target. Being a part of a marketing team, we had one main motive which is to make our brand successful enough among the other countries and also take part in the globalisation. However because of the remote working we were bound to work from our remote location. There were two things I discovered at the prior of the virtual team practices is the lack of trust and communication as well as conflicts where were not manageable by the leaders. On the other hand, the lack of face to face interaction also had the potential to make an effect on productivity (Savu, 2019). However, with the help of emotional intelligence, our leader has been able to establish communication for the betterment of the process. It helped our peers to say what they want to say as well as what ideas they have generated for the betterment of the process. The leaders have been able to activate the empathy network to know about the employees for establishing relationships. This increased the effectiveness of the team to increase the productivity of the company as well.

The leaders also applied artificial intelligence for the activities and the tasks of our team. In marketing, there is always a need to analyse the data regarding the customers feedback or for the segmentation for the branding. Previously there used to be a lot of problems for data analysis and getting the right kind of result. However the application of artificial intelligence has been helpful to make proper decisions and solving problems with the help of tools such as machine learning (Huang and Rust,, 2021). I have observed how artificial intelligence and its tools are effective in the process of data analysis which helps in branding of the products, understanding the customers and their needs, performing segmentation based on respective factors. It might have replaced the function of the human workforce but usage of artificial intelligence has been influencing the analytics network of the leaders in order to perform the decision making and problem solving process.

While researching about the effect of emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence in leadership, I found that collaborative leadership is one of the leadership which can be positively affected by emotional intelligence and AI. For the virtual teams, the collaboration leadership can be very much helpful to execute any kind of task while working together. I have observed that leaders are capable of managing emotions, understanding the same for team collaboration (Baesu, 2019). This encourages the bonding between the employees and leaders which helps decision making and problem solving as well as establishing the work culture even with the virtual team practices. Through the research I have observed that Artificial intelligence has been beneficial for the collaborative process as it takes not much time to operate, can be operated anytime in a day as well without any trouble or interruption and lastly, augments the capabilities of the individuals of the organisation. For a marketing team it can be beneficial enough to operate the tasks with high efficiency and better results.

Combination of Emotional Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence for Leadership

After the entire paper which was about managing virtual teams with the help of emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence, I can conclude that both of these factors are helpful for the current scenario of the organisational practices. For the paper I have studied two of the journal papers where authors talked about the effect of emotional intelligence and the impact of artificial intelligence for leaders and their leaderships. From the journal’s paper I learnt how the analytic and empathy network from emotional intelligence can suppress one onto another. However, if the leaders can practise properly they can be able to handle both of the networks to achieve the effectiveness of it. The authors might have argued about whether artificial intelligence can replace human workforce by arising threats to the leadership. However I observed that it can help the leaders to understand and manage the emotion of the employees, to conduct the risk collaboratively. I was also able to understand the effectiveness of the same through my real life work experiences.           

References                       

Baesu, C., 2019. Leadership based on emotional intelligence in modern organizations. The USV annals of economics and public administration, 18(2 (28)), pp.73-78.

Chamorro-Premuzic, T, Wade, M & Jordan, J 2018, ‘As AI makes more decisions, the nature of leadership will change’, Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, pp. 1-5.

Cole, M.L., Cox, J.D. and Stavros, J.M., 2019. Building collaboration in teams through emotional intelligence: Mediation by SOAR (strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results). Journal of Management & Organization, 25(2), pp.263-283.

Elfenbein, H.A. and MacCann, C., 2017. A closer look at ability emotional intelligence (EI): What are its component parts, and how do they relate to each other?. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 11(7), p.e12324.

hbr.org. 2022. Can AI Teach Us How to Become More Emotionally Intelligent?. [online] Available at: <https://hbr.org/2022/01/can-ai-teach-us-how-to-become-more-emotionally-intelligent#:~:text=Leveraging%20advances%20in%20emotion%20detection,of%20other%20verbal%20and%20non%2D> [Accessed 23 March 2022].

Huang, M.H. and Rust, R.T., 2021. A strategic framework for artificial intelligence in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 49(1), pp.30-50.

Khan, M. and Khan, A.W., 2018, March. Virtual team management challenges mitigation model (VTMCMM). In 2018 International Conference on Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies (iCoMET) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

Microsoft.com. 2022. The future of meetings – How AI will help your team work in more effective meetings. [online] Available at: <https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-365/business-insights-ideas/resources/the-future-of-meetings-using-ai-to-improve-team-collaboration> [Accessed 23 March 2022].

Savu, I., 2019. Amplifying performance in virtual teams optimizing communication strategies. Res. & Sci. Today, 17, p.112.

sciencedaily.com. 2022. [online] Available at: <https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121030161416.htm> [Accessed 23 March 2022].

Smith, M, Van Oosten, E & Boyatzis, RE 2020, ‘The best managers balance analytical and emotional intelligence’, Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, pp. 2-6.