Emotional Intelligence and Virtual Teams
There are many articles discussing emotional intelligence in teams, and a couple that are specific to virtual teams. Key to understanding the role that emotional intelligence plays on virtual teams is knowing the differences between virtual teams and normal work teams, and knowing how emotional intelligence might affect a normal team, then being able to extrapolate how the differences might affect things.
Jordan and Troth (2004) discuss the role that emotional intelligence plays in problem solving. They found that emotional intelligence is positively indicated with team performance and problem solving. Their study was in-person, so they were able to observe participants directly, and they were able to accurately compare subjects because everybody was given the same problem to solve. The study is valuable because it clearly establishes the link between emotional intelligence and team performance.
Feyerhem and Rice (2002) broke down the different components of emotional intelligence and team performance. They found correlations between understanding emotion and managing emotion and some measures of team performance. They did not find correlation between identifying emotions and team performance. EI was mainly associated with measures relating to customer service – they studied customer service teams – but not to continuous improvement. A team leader with low EI is likely to have a negative or neutral...
While it is more narrow in only studying one kind of team, and has a weakness in that some of the performance measures are actually just perception scores, rather than hard numbers, the study seeks to test the hypothesis that emotional intelligence correlates to positive outcomes, by breaking down the individual components of both emotional intelligence and team performance, and evaluating each pairing individually.
Pitts, Wright and Harkabus (2012) directly examined the role of emotional intelligence in virtual teams. They tested students, which is a little bit different than a real world situation where differences between team members can be vast – they might be on different continents, with both intercultural and time zone issues, for example. So with that weakness in mind, this study did show that emotional intelligence is a driver of team viability, and that quality of communication is a means by which influence can be created in the virtual team environment.
The study is valuable in the sense that it was one of the first (and only) to directly study emotional intelligence in virtual teams. It focused heavily on computer-mediated communication, which is the primary means by which virtual teams communicate, though there are things like video conferencing that can be provide something closer to an in-person experience. The downside is that the study used…
