Leadership Research Summary:
- Research has shown that transformational leaders are able, through emotional contagion mechanisms, to transmit their emotions and boost positive feelings among their followers. Although research on leadership and team processes have shown a positive relation between transformational leadership and workers’ well-being, there is a lack of studies examining the “black box” of this association.
- The present study aimed to assess the mediation effect of team emotional intelligence (TEI) of the management team on the relationship between management’s transformational behaviors and employees’ responses. Data were gathered from two sources: 1,566 managers grouped into 188 teams pertaining to a total of 90 firms, and 4,564 workers from the same 90 firms. The results showed that management team TEI and the emotional state of “passion” among employees had a full mediation effect on the relationship between management teams’ transformational leadership and employees’ cohesion. Implications of these results are discussed.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- The study’s findings have a number of implications. First, they highlight the importance of emotions and affectivity at both the individual and team levels, thus underlining why managers need to consider TEI as an important skill when training project teams. In this respect, our results could be used to promote workers’ well-being and create emotionally healthier organizations. For instance, activities aimed at increasing leader teams’ emotional intelligence would indirectly impact the well-being of workers and, ultimately, of the organization. In this context, recent research on large projects has found that training can improve EI in project team members (Kotsou et al., 2018).
- The use of the multilevel theoretical framework, rather than focusing solely on the shared perception of workers, helps to advance on the team-based EI research by defining the relations between TEI and workers’ responses. This research challenges and maybe complements the classical view of the relationship between leadership and employees’ outcomes, underlining the importance of both team-level and affective variables for these responses. Team emotional intelligence and the affective responses of employees combine to create structural configurations that influence working processes, shaping the linkages between leadership and cohesion.
- Finally, it should be mentioned that some researchers (e.g., Ashkanasy, 2003; Troth et al., 2012) have called for the development of models examining the effect of EI on performance at the team level, including identification of the mechanisms through which TEI may impact outcomes at work. The model developed in this study shows how TEI mediates the relationship between leadership and team cohesion. The findings therefore add to knowledge about team cohesion by providing an explanation of how TEI and passion mediate the association between leadership and cohesion.