Authors: Vinod R. Kantharia
Abstract: Emotional Intelligence (EI) has become an important leadership skill in modern organizations especially in dynamic and crisis prone business environments. Despite the fact that earlier studies have tested the connection between EI and leadership effectiveness, there is a lack of empirical studies on how EI can affect leadership styles and decision-making in crisis situations on the Indian organizational environment. To fill this gap, the current study explores the importance of EI in the leadership traits and evaluates how it is related to the team climate, productivity, and crisis related decision making strategies. The research study takes a quantitative research design, which involves a structured questionnaire, which is to be carried out to 150 individuals who are top management personnel working in the Indian firms based on purposive sampling. The proposed hypotheses were tested by using SPSS (Version 23) statistical analysis, which consisted of descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and ANOVA. The results show that EI has a strong correlation with leadership traits and has a positive relationship with team climate and productivity. In addition, EI proves to have a statistically significant influence on leadership styles in constructions of effective decision-making strategies in circumstances of crisis (p < 0.05). The more emotionally aware and regulated the leaders were, the more they could re-orient their thinking, cope with barriers experienced at the workplace and hold the team together in times of uncertainty. The research adds to the literature on leadership because it has given empirical evidence on the Indian corporate situation and emphasized EI as a strategic leadership capability in crisis management. The results imply that companies ought to incorporate the EI training in leadership courses to boost decision-making processes, organizational flexibility, and teamwork performance.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20444905
