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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.
Job contentment, interpersonal relationships at work, quality of life – for a long time, these aspects were not given importance in an organizational context. Companies were considered rational units, and emotional aspects were neglected. Where people are recognized as an increasingly important resource in a company, emotions play a significant role. In the course of this, the interest in emotional intelligence in the workplace emerged. Especially in the field of leadership, emotional intelligence is now being given more and more attention and has proven to be a cause for numerous positive effects. Due to the limited research on this relation, this thesis aims to find out if and how emotional intelligence in leadership influences employee job satisfaction, specifically in a Danish organization. After outlining the foundations of emotional intelligence in leadership, job satisfaction, and Danish business culture, the empirical research focuses on employee interviews and an evaluation of the emotional intelligence of two managers. Specific focus is put on the employees' perception of their job satisfaction and their assessment of the importance of emotionally intelligent leadership. The results show the importance of emotionally intelligent behavior, and recommendations regarding the implementation of emotional intelligence to overcome workplace challenges are given.
Since the introduction of the concept of Emotional intelligence (EI), there has been affective turbulence in the past decades in the scientific community. The interest in the concept has been growing since the popularization of it in 1995 by Goleman (Goleman, 1995). It has been claimed to be a new way to success, as it was being linked to performance, job satisfaction, many other work-related constructs (Wong & Law, 2002; Bozionelos & Singh 2017; Miao et al., 2018; Prentice, 2016) and even health-related benefits (Goleman, 2020).
On the other side, the concept of Social Intelligence (SI), which was first introduced and used by Thorndike in 1920, has been around in the scientific community for quite some time as well. It is known for reducing conflict, creating collaborations and mobilizing people towards a common goal (Albrecht, 2005).
There has been a perplexing use of them in the field of research. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to examine conceptual issues as the similarities and differences between the two constructs and drawing a clear line between the two. A theoretical review has been conducted for independently understanding each concept. Different conceptual models have been analyzed for differences and similarities, in terms of definition, use, skill, problem-solving area, depth of the construct and aim of reasoning. The conceptual analysis shows there are some distinct differences. In addition to that, the results indicate that both concepts are multidimensional, overlapping and interdependent.