Emotional Intelligence and Leadership in Higher Education Institutions: An Empirical Approach

Abstract

University Top Management are increasingly expected to be strategic and innovative in their work, whether that be increasing student success, improving teaching and learning, growing enrollments, advancing research efforts, serving the community, and more. Meeting these expectations requires leaders to work with a broad range of students, faculty, staff, and various external constituencies. At the same time, they must navigate fast paced environments, demanding schedules, increasing accountability expectations, declining or stagnated resources, and frustrating bureaucratic hurdles. These challenges can often lead to a range of emotions for the University Top Management and their teams that can include everything from feelings of frustration and disempowerment, to surprise and elation. Leaders across organizational types are coming to understand that working in an emotion-filled context requires a special set of skills, and have recognized the importance of Emotional Intelligence (EI) for leading people. Since universities are primarily people focused organizations, academic leaders can benefit from having an understanding of their own EI and how to use it within their leadership roles. EI is the ability to actively regulate your emotions and the emotions of those around you through self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Through our educational preparation, most academics are typically taught to downplay emotions so that they do not interfere with research or teaching. However, being disconnected or unaware of our own emotions and the emotions of others can be problematic when moving into a leadership role and having to work regularly with others on administrative tasks. (There is also increasing recognition that emotional intelligence has a role in teaching and research as well). This paper intends to present an empirical study that will seek to identify the relevance of emotional intelligence for effective higher education academic leadership. This paper analyzes EI and Leadership in HEIs which can be used as a basis for future research while providing a knowledge base for contemporary training of EI in HEIs.