APSS1L01 Tomorrow’s Leaders
Individual Paper
Name of the student: Lam Wang Fai,
Student ID: 16063811D
Date of the Class: Wednesday
Time of the Class: 1330 to 1630
Group Name: Era
Lecturer of the class: Pui Ki Li
Introduction of Emotional Competence and Its Relationship with Leadership
Introduction
It is believed that emotional competence (EC) facilitates relationships and plays an important role in leadership. According to Goleman (2001), it is the ability to regulate and notice emotions in others and ourselves. This term paper will be divided into 2 parts. Part A will introduce EC in 5 main concepts: emotional perception, facilitation, understanding, management and social skills.
Meanwhile, Part B will discuss my personal experiences related to leadership and EC.
Part A.
-Emotional Perception
Emotional perception is the ability to aware, recognize and express emotions precisely, it can also determine the veracity of emotions (Stys & Brown, 2004). Therefore, we are able to identify emotions through symptoms and clues, such as facial expressions or body languages (Mayer, Salovey, Caruso & Sitarenios, 2001).
It is believed that emotional perception is essential for us to input information to intelligence, which helps us to develop interpersonal communication and build up self-esteem in the following steps.
-Emotional Facilitation
Emotional facilitation is the skill to assimilate basic emotional information into our mind (Mayer, Carus & Salovey, 1999). This helps us to make use of the emotional information input from the step of emotional perception to enhance thinking, to distinguish among different emotions experienced by others and adjust thinking according to emotional information (Mayer et al., 2001).
Emotional perception and facilitation are classified to the area of Experiential EC. With these two branches of EC, we can recognize and identify feelings and emotions of others, and make correct response without necessarily understanding it.
-Emotional Understanding
Emotional understanding is the ability to analyze emotion information (Mayer, Salovey & Caruso, 2004). It is the ability to comprehend the information, think of the rationale behind and recognize the transition of emotions (Stys & Brown, 2004). After the step of emotional perception, we can recognize the emotions experienced by others, then our brain will start processing and reasoning the information.
This helps us to understand the feelings and situations of others to facilitate social relationship. Therefore, different steps are closely related to develop emotional competence.
-Emotional Management
Emotional management is the ability to connect and disconnect from emotion base on the situation and usefulness (Stys & Brown, 2004). Therefore, it is likely to help us on managing emotions to facilitate relationships with others for personal and interpersonal growth.
It interfaces our personality and emotions with our personal goals and social relationship.
Emotional understanding and management are classified to the area of Strategic EC, they allow us to understand, reason and manage emotions with the information input from the area of Experiential EC (Stys & Brown, 2004).
-Social Skills
Higher emotional competence is believed to be beneficial to social adaption, thus display better social skills, which is believed to play a significant role in leadership and relationship management (Schutte et al.,2001). Social skills are believed to be the ‘achievement’ of above steps of emotional competence.
Emotional perception facilitates sensitivity to emotions and accuracy on expression of emotions through words, body languages and facial expressions. Emotional facilitation allows us to adjust our thinking and action according to the emotional information, which is helpful to establish good relationship and cooperation with others.
Emotional understanding and management develop the ability to control emotional and consider others’ feeling. They are essential elements for social skills to facilitate leadership and relationship.
While recognizing the importance of emotional competence, some controversy on the reliability and validity has been raised. The arguments are mainly about the subjectivity and lack of studies on gender difference. According to Stys and Brown (2004), the methodology of studying EC/EI for the model of Daniel Goleman and the model of Salovey and Mayer contain a number of self-assessment questionnaires and workplace questionnaires.
The result may be affected by some subjective factors like self-esteem or bias of impression.
Besides, inadequate studies on gender difference may also affect the reliability. There is probably some gender difference on EC, such as different genders may have different viewpoints on identify emotions and different ways to express emotions. As a result, some questions on reliability of EC studies have been raised.
According to Gardner and Stough (2002), it is suggested that EC plays an important role in leadership. Emotional understanding and management provide the ability to understand, consider and control emotions, which contribute to the effectiveness of leadership. Above abilities allow leaders address difficulties or opportunities with higher efficiency since good emotional perception, assimilation and management are likely to benefit effective leadership.
With higher level of EC, leaders would probably use more positive emotions to encourage subordinates and consider the difficulties or situations faced by subordinates. Besides, leaders which aware their own emotions and subordinates’ emotion can provide more encouragement, feedback or support to their subordinates.
Part B.
Through my personal experiences, I have found that leadership and emotional competence are closely related and they have great impacts on our daily life. The experience of Liberal Studies project in Form6 and the project on emotional competence in this course helped me recognize the importance of leadership and EC.
If you ask me that whether I am a person with high emotional competence and leadership, I would probably say no. For EC, I believe that I perform well in emotional understanding and management, I can identify others’ emotion, be considerate and have good temper. However, I found difficulties in expressing emotions or thoughts to others.
Furthermore, I have low self-esteem as I always worry about being a burden to others. Therefore, I believed that I am not a qualified leader.
I noticed the importance of EC and leadership from the experience of being a leader in Liberal Studies projects. My academic result was slightly better than other groupmates, so I became the leader of the group accidentally, which was responsible for planning and distribution of tasks.
However, F.6 is a busy and stressful year for secondary school students. We did not have much time to do the project since we need to prepare for DSE, take extra lessons after school and finish lots of homework. When deadline is approaching, some arguments occurred, some groupmates started blaming others.
This experience inspired me with the importance of EC. A leader’s responsibility is not just planning and distributing the works, a good leader needs to aware the emotions of others, to be more considerate and supportive, which brings positive impacts on team spirit and motivation to enhance work efficiency.
In this experience, emotional perception helped me to notice the stressful feeling of my groupmate. Emotional understanding helped me to figure out the reason behind that he had 2 mock exams in that week, so that he did not have enough time to finish the project.
Finally, emotional management helped me to find correct ways to relieve his pressure through encouragement and providing some useful sources for his parts. This experience inspired me with the relationship between effective leadership and EC. Since then, I tried hard to improve my social skills to be a considerate person or leader with higher level of EC.
Our leader noticed that we had heavy workloads, he showed effective leadership with high level of EC to guide us to complete the project. Instead of urging us to finish our parts on time, he tried to provide support and encouragement to us. like giving advice on our works to facilitate better performance.
He also took up higher workload to facilitate cooperation, such as setting the template of PowerPoint and simplifying our works to reduce our pressure. With good emotional management and understanding, our leader controlled his emotion well to avoid blaming others on dissatisfied works and took appropriate measures base on our situations, including encouragement and advice to reduce our stressful feeling and motivate us to facilitate better coordination.
I believe that effective leadership with higher EC would be beneficial to our professional development. As a building service engineer, better EC helps us control our emotions especially facing the consumers. Moreover, engineering projects required the cooperation of whole team and sometimes it is unavoidable to be a leader.
We can encourage others with good emotion management and positive emotions to enhance staff morale. Higher emotional competence helps us to demonstrate effective leadership and establish better relationship or coordination with colleagues to facilitate better development.
Conclusion
Based on the experiences and evaluations above, it seems reasonable and persuasive that EC and effective leadership are closely related through the 5 main concepts. Besides, leadership and EC also have a great impact on our future career. As mentioned before, I am not good at expressing emotions.
Word count: Introduction: 72 words
Part A: 758 words
Part B: 780 words
Conclusion: 69 words
Total: 1679 words
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