Presenter: Jeremy Yip Supervisor: Stéphane Côté

1. The Perceptive Leader: The Congruence of Leader’s Emotion Recognition with Staff Member’s Emotional Experience Presenter: Jeremy Yip Supervisor: StéphaneCôté Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management Joseph L. Rotman School of Management

2. Emotional Intelligence • Emotional intelligence (EI) pertains to the ability to carry out accurate reasoning about emotions and use emotional knowledge to enhance thought • Ability model of EI • EI is related to various types of performance

3. Emotion Recognition Ability (ERA) • Of the various domains of EI, emotional perception may be critical for the performance of effective leadership behaviors • The research on ERA focuses on the ability to decode others’ emotions through nonverbal channels • There is informational value communicated through moods and emotions that influence judgments

4. Leader Effectiveness & Emotional Intelligence • Leaders recognize emotions in followers to better gauge appropriate leader behaviours • Executives who were higher on EI, specifically the capacity to perceive emotions, tended to be more effective leaders

5. ERA and Positive Workplace Outcomes • Positive association between supervisory status and the recognition of nonverbal cues • Emotion recognition ability positively predicted transformational leadership behaviour and this association was moderated by extraversion

6. The Absence of the Association Between ERA and Workplace Outcomes • No correlation between emotion recognition and counselling outcomes

7. The Downside of Accurate Emotion Recognition • In certain instances, the information gleaned through nonverbal channels can mislead the perceiver, causing him or her to “read too much” into peripheral social cues

8. The Research Problem • How can we account for these inconsistent findings? • Emotion recognition is the most reliably validated component within the construct of emotional intelligence • However, Roberts and his colleagues (2006) concluded that emotional intelligence and emotion recognition tests may suffer from imperfect validity

9. Let’s Take a Look at an Example • Happy • Sad • Angry • Afraid DANVA

10. Limitations of the Current Approach • Dynamic nonverbal information is not conveyed • Lack of realism that corresponds to a social interaction • Only one part of the dyadic process

11. Purpose of the Present Study • One alternative to the use of static performance-based assessments of emotion recognition is the use of behavioral role-play exercises • The accuracy of emotion recognition is computed on the basis of how similar the emotion that a perceiver recognizes in a target and the actual emotion reported by the target

12. Leader Performance • Consideration is the degree to which a leader shows concern and respect for followers • Initiating Structure is the degree to which a leader defines and organizes his role and the roles of followers

13. Hypothesis • It is hypothesized that a more accurate perception of emotions, as measured by emotional congruence from the perspective of the leader, is positively predictive of leader performance

14. Participants and Procedure • 226 MBA students participated in a role-play case study • Randomly assigned to roles • Emotion Recognition • Leaders were asked to what degree certain emotions were present in a staff member at the end of the meeting • Staff members were asked to what degree certain emotions were experienced at the end of the meeting • Observers rated the leader on performance

15. Measures • Predictor variables: • Affect scale • Ex. “Happiness”, 7-point scale • High internal consistency and temporal stability • Outcome variables: • Leader Behaviour Description Questionnaire • Ex. “ The leader was friendly and approachable (C)” and “The leader scheduled the work to be done (I)”, 7-point scale • α = .81; moderately strong validity

16. Congruence Analysis • Congruence is determined using difference scores between two component measures to predict an outcome • We used polynomial regression equations

17. Testing Difference Scores

18. Results: ERA and Consideration Hierarchical regression analyses yielded the following: Model 2 Model 1

19. Results: ERA and Initiating Structure Hierarchical regression analyses yielded the following: Model 2 Model 1

20. Discussion • No support found for ERA, as measured by congruence, as a predictor for leader performance • Why? • Low inter-rater reliability of the outcome measure (.21 and .19) • Observers based their assessments on the staff member’s emotional state through backtracking • One-time meeting with no future or repeated interactions • Time constraint may have resulted in leaders giving in to staff members’ demands and observers may have felt rushed

21. Limitations • No experimental manipulation precludes our ability to determine causation • Sample consisted of students in a role-play exercise rather than employees involved in on-going working relationships • Artificial time limit

22. Implications • There is still value in behavioural assessments, but we should consider the following: • Train observers • Avoid the use of concurrent predictor and outcome measures in order to reduce the likelihood of any observer backtracking errors • Allow longer time frames for interactions

23. Questions or Comments jeremy.yip06@rotman.utoronto.ca