Emotional Intelligence and Team Performance: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

This research investigates the relationship among a team's emotional intelligence, the team leader's emotional intelligence, and team performance. Twenty‐six customer service teams and their leaders were studied using the three components of Salovey and Mayer's (1990) conception of emotional intelligence: Understanding emotion, managing emotion, and identifying emotions. Team members and two corporate directors assessed team performance using customer service, accuracy, productivity, and continuous improvement as performance indicators. Of the three components of emotional intelligence (EI) studied, only understanding emotion and managing emotion positively correlated with some measures of team performance. However, no correlations occurred between identifying emotions and any performance measure. Of the six positive correlations between team EI and team performance, three were between EI and customer service. No EI components correlated with productivity or continuous improvement performance measures. Study results also indicate that team leader EI has a neutral to negative relationship with team performance from the team members' perspectives. The data show, overall that a negative relationship exists between team leader EI and team performance as rated by individuals. The only positive correlation was between team leader understanding emotion scores and customer service, as rated by managers. This result is consistent with the findings stated previously that team EI positively correlates with customer service.