Emotional intelligence in knowledge intensive work groups : an empirical study

Organizations become more and more dependent on the performance of small, autonomous, knowledge-intensive work groups. In line with the rise of the workgroups and teams, the scope of emotional intelligence moves from individual studies to team level ones. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of group related variables (cross functional integration, the strength of work group leader and collaboration) on emotional intelligence of knowledge intensive work groups. After a detailed literature review concerning cross functional integration, the strength of work group leader, collaboration and emotional intelligence, a survey is conducted on software development teams. The results demonstrate that cross functional integration and collaboration both have positive effects on emotional recognition while strength of work group leader and collaboration is positively related to emotional regulation. Moreover the findings show that the impact of collaboration on both emotional recognition and emotional regulation is higher than the other group related factors.