The effect of team emotional intelligence on team process and effectiveness

Abstract

Team emotional intelligence is expected to have a significant impact on intrateam conflict and team effectiveness. However, to date, there has been a dearth of empirical evidence of this link. Taking a comprehensive approach, our study contributes to the literature on intrateam conflict and team emotional intelligence. Data collected from 79 teams in South Korean companies reveal that team emotional intelligence is negatively related to team process (i.e., task conflict and relationship conflict) and positively related to team effectiveness (i.e., team performance, innovation, and cohesion). In addition, team emotional intelligence has a moderating effect on decoupling task conflict and relationship conflict. Our findings also indicate that team emotional intelligence decreases the negative effects of task conflict on team effectiveness, and of relationship conflict on team cohesion. We conclude this study with a discussion of limitations and implications for future research.

Influence of Transformational Leadership on Employees’ Innovative Work Behavior in Sustainable Organizations: Test of Mediation and Moderation Processes

“…Innovative work behavior (IWB) is an important factor that management scholars need to consider, significantly, in order to gain a competitive advantage [4] and establish organizational sustainability. Apart from research and development, the organizations operating in the highly competitive business environment also need innovative work behavior in other domains of businesses [5][6][7], in order to discover new ways of satisfying customer demands [8][9][10], and retain their competitive position in the business world [11]. Since the organizations rely on different actors to stimulate innovative work behavior [4], the organizational leaders are the most prominent actors who can foster innovative work behavior at the workplace, and thus bring new changes to an elusive situation [12][13][14][15].…”

Team Emotional Intelligence: Emotional Processes as a Link Between Managers and Workers

“…Following Druskat and Wolff (2001), we consider that transformational leadership helps to generate emotionally intelligent norms and patterns of behavior which enable the team to work more efficiently. Thus, teams high in TEI are able to generate norms for adequately managing conflicts that arise within the group (Ayoco et al, 2008), which in turn promotes greater cooperation, coordination, and communication among members (Lee and Wong, 2019).…”

“…If we consider the team to be an entity in itself, then its performance depends less on the individual characteristics of team members than on the structures and patterns of behavior they generate within a specific team (Ashkanasy, 2003;Elfenbein, 2006), in other words, on the TEI. To put it another way, each team has a singular nature that derives from the experiences, learning, norms, and ways of functioning that define it; this idiosyncratic quality of teams may be defined in terms of teamlevel variables such as emotional climate (Peñalver et al, 2017) and TEI (Lee and Wong, 2019).…”

“…Based on the notion of emotional contagion (Barsade, 2002) and affective events theory (AET; Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996;Weiss, 2002) it has been proposed that the extent to which teams engage in interpersonal emotional processes could influence not only a team's effectiveness but also -through trickle-down effects -employees' individual affect and behaviors (Tse et al, 2018). Although team emotional intelligence can be expected to influence intrateam conflict (i.e., task conflict and relationship conflict) and team effectiveness (i.e., team performance, innovation, and cohesion), team emotional intelligence has been largely unexplored (Lee and Wong, 2019).…”

Ups and downs on the roller coaster of task conflict: the role of group cognitive complexity, collective emotional intelligence and team creativity

“…They suggested that teams with greater collective emotional skills during interactions would promote an environment where the members are more prone to listen to alternative viewpoints and follow the appropriate rules of communication exchange. Also, the results of a more recent study (Lee & Wong, 2017) show that team emotional intelligence decreases the negative effect of task conflict on team effectiveness. Moreover, their findings indicate that team emotional intelligence plays a moderating role on decoupling task conflict and relationship conflict, which might harm the team's interaction processes.…”