Emotional intelligence was once seen as secondary to leadership ability, but shifting workplace values have brought it to the forefront. Today, it’s increasingly recognized as essential for effective management.
Just two decades ago, it wasn’t even part of the conversation. Now, it’s viewed as a core competency, driven by a deeper understanding of how emotions shape team dynamics, communication, and overall performance.
Today's organizations recognize that employee well-being directly correlates with productivity and results.
Research from Oxford University demonstrates this connection clearly: happy workers are 13% more productive than their less satisfied counterparts. Many experts even state that organizations lacking emotionally intelligent leadership face a higher turnover rate, and we can see why.
As traditional command-and-control approaches give way to more collaborative, people-centered management styles, leaders must master the ability to understand and manage both their own emotions and those of their teams.
In this article, you'll discover why this has become indispensable for modern leaders and learn practical strategies for developing this crucial skill set to drive both team performance and organizational success.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence has to do with the interplay between self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills. It involves recognizing and managing your own emotional responses while understanding and appropriately influencing the emotions of others.
This shouldn’t be conflated with manipulation or suppressing feelings, it's more about creating an honest, authentic environment where emotions serve as valuable information rather than annoying, disruptive forces.
In the leadership context, emotional intelligence presents itself as the ability to navigate the intricate web of human dynamics that drive team performance.
This means understanding that an employee's frustration might signal unclear expectations, that excitement can indicate untapped potential, or that withdrawal might reflect feeling undervalued.
The outdated expectation that emotions should be compartmentalized from work ignores a fundamental truth: humans are inherently emotional beings whose feelings influence every decision, interaction, and creative process. This is particularly true in workplace situations like:
- Reward and recognition
- Change and uncertainty
- Achievement and failure
- Interactions with colleagues
- Conflict and relationships
Rather than viewing emotions as obstacles to productivity, emotionally intelligent leaders recognize them as essential data points that, when properly understood and channeled, can significantly enhance team cohesion, innovation, and overall performance.
Some organizations even prioritize EQ above IQ and technical skills. It’s not that those skills are irrelevant, but even with the best training in the world, a leader’s success will always be limited if they cannot get the best out of their teams.
What Influences Team Emotions?
So far we’ve discussed how combining emotional intelligence and leadership helps organizations protect and engage employees, but work is rarely an individual experience.
Most people work as part of a team, and if you think about your own experience of working in a team, you’ll probably recognize how team members converge and can share feelings and moods at a collective level.
Team members share similar emotions because they are exposed to the same influences and events at work. Here are a few examples:
- Being collectively praised by a manager
- Work-free team building events
- Receiving equal rewards and compensation
- Encouragement for self-care
- Trust and flexibility around telecommuting
Situations that may generate negative emotions include:
- Unequal pay or recognition for similar work
- Stress due to excessive or unequal workloads
- Preferential treatment or promotion
- Personal conflicts or personality clashes
- Lack of trust in management and each other
Indeed, research also suggests that moods and emotions can spread between team members subconsciously. This phenomenon, known as emotional contagion, sees moods and emotions transfer between group members like a virus.
Meaning if one team member is unhappy, it may spread to other members quickly via hallway gossip and “quiet quitting” behaviors.
Some team members may also consciously alter their mood to match their colleagues. This sort of behavior is common among new starters, who may follow the emotions and behaviors of co-workers to help them fit in.
Elevating Team Emotions For Success
Managing and elevating team emotions plays a central part in the organizational culture. Research reveals that the emotional culture of an organization influences factors such as employee satisfaction, productivity, and burnout.
It also impacts ‘hard’ measures like absenteeism and financial performance. With that in mind, here are some steps you can take to shape and manage team emotions in the workplace.
Promote Positive Team Emotions
Multiple studies have found that shared positive emotions in workplace teams deliver many benefits, including happiness, motivation, and engagement. When team members exhibit the same positive emotions, it leads to an increase in cooperation and performance.
Leaders have a crucial role in promoting these positive emotions. They must invest time and effort to understand what motivates people in their working lives and pay attention to their happiness and wellbeing.
Team members frequently look to their managers and leaders to see what emotions they exhibit and mirror them. Therefore, leaders can also set the emotional tone by exhibiting the behaviors and emotions they want to see in their teams.
Create a Safe Psychological Environment
Creating a culture of psychological safety plays a central part in building high-performing teams. In psychologically safe teams, employees feel respected and accepted, and they are free to be themselves and exhibit their emotions without the fear of negative consequences for their career or status.
Studies show that psychological safety contributes to more positive work environments where employees are more engaged, more productive, less stressed, and more likely to collaborate.
Leaders with high EQ can create higher levels of psychological safety by managing conflicts effectively, communicating efficiently, and building stronger professional relationships.
Consider Your Team’s Emotional Composition
When building a team, you’ll need the necessary technical skills, but you should also think about the team’s composition from an emotional point of view.
Diversity is generally considered a strength of professional teams, but when it comes to the way team members express and regulate their emotions, some studies show that too much emotional diversity can lower performance and damage relationships.
Another reason to carefully consider team composition is the convergence of team emotions, like a collective mindset. Someone with emotional traits that are thought of as negative could detrimentally affect the rest of the team and diminish performance.
Recognizing the signs and qualities of emotional intelligence makes it easier to identify individuals who will have a positive emotional impact on the team environment.
Likewise, it’s not impossible to help team members improve their emotional intelligence, since it's essentially a set of behaviors that can be inculcated.
Emotional Intelligence and Leadership: Key Takeaways
These days, emotional intelligence is a non-negotiable for leaders of everything from startups to international organizations.
Not only is it central to enhancing the experience of each employee, but it also enables you to achieve a culture that gives your teams the care and support they need to flourish. The good news is that EQ is a skill that leaders can nurture and develop just like any other.
Given the positive impact it has on employee wellness and engagement, and business objectives such as profitability and productivity, it’s a skill business leaders should work on with as much dedication and diligence as any other.
