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The importance of emotional intelligence for a leader

Nowadays in business concultancy industry, a good leader needs many skills to excel escpecially emotional intelligence. The purpose of the assessement is to evaluate the importance of emotional intelligence for a leader and the extent to which it can be taught. Analyze of leadership and the impact of emotional intelligence are highlighted. Another point of the assessment is the interaction between those concepts.

Leadership

In any businesses, tasks are created by some people and then are excuted by other people to produce goods and/or services. Huges et all (2001) state that leadership is a process not a position. Indeed a leader can be found in any scales of business, in the management team as well as in the workforce. That is why leadership can not be defined as a specific position but as a process. This process involves something happening as a result of the interaction between a leader and followers. A lot of définitions exist for leadership but Hollander and Julian (1969) defined leadership as the présence of a particular influence relationship between two or more people.

Leaders have to find ways to « influence » followers to excel in a business Knight (2007). As a workforce is composed by human, some concepts such as émotion and feelings have to be understand and executed by a leader. Huges et all observe that leadership involves both the rational and emotional sides of the human expérience (2001). Then a leader in any functions of any businesses should take actions and influences based on reason and logic. But also based on feelings such as inspiration and passions. Burns argued that good leadership also involves touching others feelings (1978). Emotion play an important rôle in leadership. The perception of feeling and émotion are very important. But a leader has to be aware about not using only feeling and émotion. Staying rational is also fundamental. Finaaly even if many different style of...