Emotional Intelligence and Its Importance in the Workplace

Running head: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
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EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Emotional intelligence can be defined as the arena of the cognitive ability that plays an
important role in facilitating interpersonal behavior. Popular psychologist as well as behavioral
science journalist namely Dr. Goleman had been responsible for popularizing the term emotional
intelligence (Serrat 2017). He has described it as the ability of an individual to manage his
feelings actively so that feelings are expressed in proper ways. According to him, emotional
intelligence can be considered as one of the single largest predictor of success at workplace. One
of the most important components of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. Persons with high
self-awareness are able to understand their own strengths and weaknesses (Schutte and Loi
2014). They also have proper ideas about their own skills and understand how their actions affect
others. The second component is called self-regulation that is mainly the ability of the
individuals to control emotions as well as impulses. Those professionals who can self regulate
never allows themselves in becoming jealous or expressing anger and disappointment. They
never become impulsive and careless decision taker. They take time and think properly before
they act (Ouyang, Sang and Peng 2015). The characteristics that they show are integrity,
thoughtfulness and similar others. The other important components are motivation as
professionals who have high level of emotional intelligence are self-motivated. They are seen to
be not only resilient but they are also driven by their inner ambition. They are not influenced by
external forces like money and similar others. Empathy is another component of emotional
intelligence. Such a professional usually has compassion and he can easily connect with different
people in workplace on an emotional level (Carusso et al. 2015). This helps them to provide
response to other people’s concerns genuinely. Another important skill is social skills.
Emotionally intelligent people can easily be able to develop trust with other people. They are

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EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
also able to gain respect from other people by applying their social skills of communication and
develop harmonious relationships (Murphy 2014).
I believe that emotional intelligence plays a great role in determining success of an
individual in the workplace in maintaining harmony among the team members. This also helps
an individual in ensuring proper development of bonding among members of the team, and
hence better workplace climate is maintained. An individual with high emotional intelligence can
control their emotions effectively and in turn help in maintaining themselves in ways where they
are positively perceived by others (Martin et al. 2016). This is the first reason why this topic
impresses me as I believe that this would make me a better person and a better professional. I
believe that many of us proceeds through the life making important decisions that usually
remains based on our current circumstances. In many situations, we perceive certain conditions
in workplace to be beyond our abilities to change and thereby we tend to limit many solutions as
well as options (Vratskikh et al. 2016). Therefore, I believe that taking time out, reflecting, and
examining the reasons of our activities help us to lead lives, which are determined, by conscious
intentions rather than circumstances alone. The emotional intelligence thereby plays an important
role in affecting the quality of the lives as the components influence different behaviors and
relationships in different situations. Therefore, this becomes my second reason to like this topic.
This topic is interesting to me (third reason), as I believe that if I am able to develop a high level
of emotional intelligence, I will be able to communicate successfully with others and thereby
cause reduction of anxiety and stress. I can diffuse conflicts at workplace and thereby help in
improving relationship among different members, which are very important for, maintain
effective teamwork. Empathizing with each other helps in developing connections with other
colleagues that tends to realize pressure, tensions, and even several queries during teamwork