Open Access

Saskia Bölle

• As globalization continues and markets are getting more international, skilled workers from different cultural backgrounds providing language skills as well as expertise about local customs can be a competitive advantage and key success to succeed on foreign markets. Further, cross-cultural teams are said to be more effective compared to homogenous teams. However, this is only the case if this team is managed and led by a good leader. Poorly led cross-cultural teams often underperform and are highly ineffective. Therefore, a leader of cross-cultural teams has to handle cultural differences in addition to his motivating and inspiring responsibilities. A highly discussed ability of leaders that should have a significant influence on team performance and effectiveness is “Emotional Intelligence”. The model of Emotional Intelligence includes the capability to correctly appraise, express and regulate one’s own and others’ emotions as well as to manage emotions for better outcomes. Some proponents of Emotional Intelligence even consider these abilities as more crucial as an individual’s general intelligence. However, Emotional Intelligence has its origins mainly in Western literature and research, and there is a lack of comprehensive research on cultural influences on Emotional Intelligence. This implies that an individual is probably considered as emotionally intelligent in one culture but fails in recognizing and handling emotions in other cultural setting. This work provides a review on research on the field of intelligence and the development of the concept of emotional intelligence, the basis of emotions as well as leadership requirements. Further it will be analysed how the abilities of recognizing, regulating, and managing emotions differ among different national culture. The result implies that abilities relating to emotional intelligence differ strongly among cultures and the cultural background of an individual has significant impacts of his/her emotional intelligent abilities. Moreover, an individual that is emotional intelligent in his/her own culture might not be emotional intelligent in another culture. Therefore, an emotionally intelligent leader might succeed in positively influencing his followers if they are from the same cultural background but fails when leading a cross-cultural team. Limitations of the findings are the dominant Western literature about the topics as well as the complexity of emotions and culture.