Leadership and Emotional Intelligence
Discuss about the Leadership and Management Concepts for Health Professionals NRS3222.
Nursing have an important role in the healthcare industry, and emotional intelligence helps nurses in managing the healthcare unit, which reduces the stress for leaders and managers. Nurses provide holistic care for the patient without judging their gender, religion, culture (Hoeve, Jansen &Roodbol, 2013).Emotional Intelligence (EI) plays avital role for the nursing staffs to deliver excellent quality health care services to the patient. Intelligence quotient was the only parameter used to indicate the success of the individual, but now the emotional intelligence is also considered as one of the vital parameters in the nursing department (Aradilla-Herrero, Tomás-Sábado & Gómez-Benito, 2013). A high level of EI indicates that a nurse is highly capable of managing and controlling his/her emotions as well as the emotion of others. This will increase the safety of the patient and build a good relationship with others. Leadership and management have also become a part of nursing as it will help the nurses to manage and improve the medical ward and provide a healthy environment for the patients and staffs (Kim, 2014).
This paper discusses the emotional intelligence, the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership, managerial period relationship, theimpact of EI on nursing staffs and the consequences of not having proper emotional intelligence. This paper also contains some recommendations how emotional intelligence can be used for developing managerial skills and nursing leaders by which the medical unit can get a healthy and a positive environment.
The ability of an individual to control one’s own emotion as well as controlling someone else’s emotion to differentiate people and using this information to guide actions is known as Emotional Intelligence (Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2013). Emotional intelligence has threecompetencies that can be categorised into Self-awareness, self-management and social competence.Social competency includes relationship management and social awareness (Sullivan, 2013). Social awareness means identifying personal emotions and expressing those emotions accordingly. People having high social awareness are very sensitive and can predict other’s emotion (Guillen &Florent-Treaacy, 2011). Self-management means controlling the sentimentto buildan environment that makes the group or team feel motivated, regarded, happy and increase self-esteem. Social competency defines the understanding of others emotion and response to particular environmental stimuli.
Emotional intelligence will affect the healthcare positively and will increase the productivity by creating a trusting and appropriate environment (Guillen &Florent-Treacy, 2011). Emotional intelligence helps in increasing the leadership quality of the staffs by helping them to understand the emotions of the staffs and motivating them, which improves the staff involvement and their productivity.
Models of Emotional Intelligence
Leadership is defined as someone’s ability to influence someone by using interpersonal skills to achieve a specific goal (Sullivan, 2013). The two most essential leadership styles are transactional and transformational style. Transactional leaders are those who value the structure of the organisation and the orders. Emotional intelligence needs someone who can follow the orders and can maintain the structure of the organisation. Transformational leaders are those who work with the subordinates to recognise or identify the key changes needed in the organisation. Emotional intelligence is effective when the leader will work with their subordinate to understand the problem the patients or the staffs are facing (Dumdum, Lowe and Avolio, 2013).
Emotional Intelligence has two models:
Ability model
Mayer, Caruso and Salovey (Sadri, 2012) developed this model of Emotional Intelligence. This model has four levels. The top most level is perceived, the second level is using, the third level is understanding, and the last level is managing emotions.The first level of ability model is defined as the ability to perceive or understand theemotionof someone by recognising the expressions and interpreting those expressions. Next level focuses on using or understanding the emotions to develop thoughts and examining how an individual will react when two different emotions are put against each other. The third level refers to understanding those reactions or emotions. The last level defines the capability to manage the emotion of the staffs. It defines the potential to manage conflicts or reducing someone’s anxiety (Sadri, 2012).
Goleman Model
Goleman model explains EI as the ability to motivate someone who is frustrated. It is a model of EI, which consists of five different types of skills, which is categorised into social skills and personal skills. Personal skills include self-awareness, motivation and self-regulation. Social competency includes empathy, and social skill means the understanding of other’s feelings(Sadri, 2012). Self-awareness refers to understanding what an individual is feeling and knowinghow the moods have effects on others. Self-regulation is redirecting or controlling someone’s emotions and anticipating the consequences. Motivation means utilising the emotional factors to achieve organisational goals. Empathy refers to sensing orunderstanding the emotions of others. Social skills denote managing the relationship between the staffs, motivating and inspiring others.
Author Guillen &Florent-Treacy (2011) explains self-awareness as one of the vitalcomponents in EI competencies. Self-awareness may not positivelyaffect the nursing leaderdirectly, but it will surely help the nursing leader to identify and deal with the emotion of the staff, which will help in motivating the workers of the team (Guillen &Florent-Treacy, 2011). As a result, it will decrease the rate of burnouts; increase the performance of the team, it will improve the communication between the staffs. Researchers have shown that higher emotional intelligence resulted in higher productivity and a positive working environment (Codier&Muneno, 2013; Afolabi, Awosola&Omole, 2010).Emotional intelligence also helped in stress reduction (Tyczkowski et al., 2015).EI is interconnected with the transformational style of leadership and has increased the performance of the team (Sadri, 2012).
Impact of EI on Nursing Leadership
EI improves the quality of management in the health unit. Leadership quality for nursing has increased due to the increased level of nursing shortages. EI is important for retaining the nurses by improving the job satisfaction (Feather, 2009). Decreasing the job complexity will improve the work satisfaction among the nurses’, and it will help in delivering quality health care and a healthy environment (Feather, 2009). According to some researchers like Clancy(2014), managers with high emotional intelligence will obtain a high rate of retaining staff, optimal organisational outcome, better patient satisfaction and will reduce bullying.Emotional intelligence also helps in preventing and resolving the conflicts by using dialogue so that both parts can speak, attentive listening and helps in avoidingprejudice. It will also help the leaders to motivate the staffs to get a solution, which will satisfy both the parties (McGrath, 2013).
The managerial pyramid consists of three different levels they are as follows:
Strategic level
Tactical level
Operational level (Sullivan, 2013)
The first level of the managerial pyramid is strategic level, whichneeds a lot of knowledge than tactical and operational level. Operational level requires technical skill.Communication is common in all the levels of the managerial pyramid. ANOE fivecompetencies explainthat a manager should be capable in all the levels of communication, professionalism, healthcare knowledge, leadership skills and skill of business (Sullivan, 2013). It has been proved that employees are leaving jobs due to lack of leadership skill, which indicates that emotional intelligence is highly required for the managers (Feather, 2009).
Poor or lack of emotional intelligence presence affects the team as well as the leader. Poor emotional intelligence may not affect the production directly but it may affect the staff motivation and it may reduce their productivity. Lack of emotional intelligence will decrease the tolerance level for stress and eventually increase the rate of burnouts (Landa&Leopez-Zafra, 2010). The low emotional intelligence of the leader will affect the productivity, which will result in low employee commitment, increase layoffs and increases the job insecurity (Afolabi, Awosola&Omele, 2010).
Gillen &Florent in 2011 has suggested the use of self-awareness program. According to Gillen &Florent(2011), the self-awareness program will make them self-aware so that they can understand the position they are standing. Apart from this employee testing is necessary to aware the nurses what their capabilities are. Research has shown that out of 33 participants only 57% of nurses can use their emotional intelligence or capable of using their emotional intelligence (Codier&Muneno, 2013). Moreover, many researchers also conclude that providing frequent constructive feedback, support withperformance appraisal and educational session and leadership quality development programme can improve the emotional intelligence (Tyckowski et al., 2015; Sadri, 2012). Nursing areas lackthe researching of the studies, which shows the effect of possessing emotional intelligence. However,there have been attempts of using emotional intelligence and the result signifies the growth in the employee’s production and the outcomes also increases (Rankin, 2013; Feather, 2009; Michelangelo, 2015).
Importance of EI in nursing leadership
Conclusion
EI is an importantaspect of the health industry. It is an essential aspect because it helps the managers and leaders to manage the emotions of their employee. Emotional intelligence also helps the leaders and managers to motivate the employee or staffs which results in improved outcomes and better productivity. Emotional Intelligence is vital in nursing as it helps to deliver a high quality standard of care to the patients to satisfy them. It also increases the productivity of the organization and staffs satisfaction, which reduces the percentage of burnouts, and increases or improve work outcomes. Lack of emotional intelligence or poor EI has an adverse effect on the healthcare unit as well as to theleader, which decreases the employee retention. It also reduces the ability of the staff to handle pressure or stress. Ultimately, it results in increases the job insecurity among the staffs and reduces their productivity.
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