97% of employees surveyed said they could be more productive;
49% said they could increase productivity by 50% or more. 30
Getting Work Done
Shifting to productivity, several studies link emotional competence in individuals and leadership to the ability to get work accomplished. For example, a major sales study showed top performing sales clerks are 12 times more productive than those at the bottom and 85% more productive than an average performer. About one-third of this difference is due to technical skill and cognitive ability while two-thirds is due to emotional competence. 22 The affect (emotional behavior) of the leaders plays a major role in team performance. You can see this clearly in the way “everyone just knows” when boss is having a bad day. The way feelings spread from one person to another is called “emotional contagion.” “In a study of the influence of the contagion of mood of a group leader on group members, the positive mood of the leader positively influenced group members at both the individual and collective level with the opposite for leader’s negative mood. The leader’s positive mood also had a subsequent influence on group coordination and effort. 23 In 2002, Sigal Barsade of Yale University examined the effect of emotional contagion within teams. In her experiment, a trained actor was placed within groups and directed to participate in the groups’ activities while enacting varying levels of pleasantness and energy. The groups were working to assign a pay bonus; they had a fixed amount of money they could spend and had to allocate it based on a set of performance criteria.
PAGE 15
White Paper The Business Case for Emotional Intelligence
Made with FlippingBook Annual report