Relation between change management and emotional intelligence


Every business need to go through changes in the comparative business environment , this may happen different ways in different organisations, some of organisations may imposing the changes on workforces, such as redundant, salary review. Others may focus on re-engineer or re-structure business model. However, change management is the basic skills for managers and leader to adopt; it is essential approach to organisation to implement.

( ) define change management as “The systematic approach and application of knowledge, tools and resources to deal with change. Change management means defining and adopting corporate strategies, structures, procedures and technologies to deal with changes in external conditions and the business environment”. There are different change management models been published, such as Kanter’s 10 commandments, Pettigrew 5 factors, Kotter’s 8 failure and success factors .

Similarly, at the beginning stage of change models, it is essential to create vision to change then motivate employees to accept, act and attain the change. It is not easy as says. People have good reason to resistant the changes, because the nature of change , include the risk and uncertainty, which most of people do not like that, also different people have the different preferences, some people like to stay where they are, these people can be named as “stability oriented”. Some people may resistance to change for emotional reasons, for instance, someone doesn’t like to change job, because he/ she doesn’t want someone else to tell them what to do.

SARA Model

Therefore, when the change is undergoing, people tend to go through a series of stages, people call it as “SARA” Model:

S- hcok

A- nger

R- ejection

A- cceptance

Shock: It is nature for people to face the shock, when it comes across the changes, confusion or disorientation is symptom in this stage.

Anger: it expresses in different ways, employee may anger with oneself or others, in particular, people close to them, they need to show the feeling when the change happen.

Rejection: in some case, at first, people would like to reject the change rather to accept it instantly. In this stage, the rejection not only appear on the action, also include the denial of emotional impact.

Acceptance: in the stage, people able to accept the change and adopt it. It also involved the negative acceptance, such as resign for work.

The key principle advocated by the change management theory is communication; it is significant to keep employees informed completely before the change happens, the managers should prepare themselves to deal with employee’s reaction in the change process. It is not simply get people together and give orders, the manager need to monitor employee’s emotion in different stages of SARA model.

Emotion and Emotional Intelligence

Emotion is the power to drive the employee’s actions in the organisation; it is also the primary driving force behind motivation. Manager’s need to be aware of employee’s emotion movement, be able to understand it, then control the emotion in certain level to maintain the relationship, teamwork and work efficiency. The development of the reading and express emotions along with management skills will improve motivation for employee and increase the productivity for organisation.

In 1980’s psychologists, evolutionary biologists, psychiatrists, scientists had identified a series of human capacities related to emotions. By 1983, a psychologist, Howard Gardner from Harvard university, who identified the “multiple intelligence”, as ( ) claimed ” it has seven kind of intelligence, include two “personal varieties: knowing one’s inner world and social adeptness.”

The term “emotional Intelligence” was introduced by two psychologists, John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey in 1990, they define the Emotional Intelligence as “the set of abilities that account for how people’s emotional perception and understanding vary in their accuracy. More formally, emotional intelligence as the ability to perceive and express emotion, assimilate emotion in thought, understand and reason with emotion, and regulate emotion in the self and others”. ( )

In contrast, in 1995, Daniel Goleman published a book called “emotional intelligence: why it can matter than IQ”, which became the best-seller internationally, ( ) claimed the emotional intelligence as “the abilities called here emotional intelligence, which include self control, zeal and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself.”

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Theories of Emotional Intelligence

Mayer-Salovey ability model

In 1997 , John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey proposed the Mayer-Salovey ability model, it include four level. Show as below:

Perception and Expression of Emotion

Assimilating Emotion in Thought

Understanding and Analysing Emotion

Reflective Regulation of Emotion

Perception and Expression of Emotion: the most basic level of emotional intelligence, it involve the perception and appraisal of emotion. For example, in the organisation, managers should able to identifying oneself and employee’s emotion and interpret it, in order to maintain the synergy within the organisation.

Assimilating Emotion in Thought: the second level of emotional intelligence, it is the capacity of emotions to enter into cognitive thinking, use the emotion to communicate feelings. According to ( ) said the “emotions prioritize thinking”, for example, sometimes, people tend to respond to things emotionally, not rationally. It is something manager should pay attention.

Understanding and Anglicising emotion: the third level of emotional intelligence, understand and reasoning about the emotion, for instance, happy, anger, sad, fear. It is important for managers to recognise the emotions, aware how employee unfold them and reason about them.

Reflective Regulation of Emotion: it is the highest level of emotional intelligence, it involve the management and regulation of emotion in oneself and others. Mangers should utilise these skills into workplace, manage the employee’s emotion and motivate them to work effectively.

The Bar-On Theory

Unlike Mayer-Salovey ability model seen the EQ as abilities in different level, the Psychologist Reuven Bar-On ( ) viewed the emotional intelligence as “array of nonncognative capabilities, competencies, and skills that influence one’s ability to succeed in coping with environment demands and pressures.” Bar-On identified five functional areas which are essential to emotional intelligence, show as following:

( )

Intrapersonal Skills

Interpersonal skills

Adaptability Scales

Stress- Management Scales

General Mood





Intrapersonal skills include emotional self-awareness, assertiveness, self-regards, self-actualization and independence.

Interpersonal skills, there are interpersonal relationships, social responsibility and empathy.

Adaptability scales cover problem solving, reality testing and flexibility.

Stress-management scales involve stress tolerance and impulse control.

General mood, happiness and optimism are two keys.

Bar-On ( ) believes that if people go through appropriate training, emotional intelligence ability can be improved, furthermore, he believes that EQ along with IQ, construct the general intelligence of human beings. Bar-On developed the first measure of emotional intelligence, called “Emotional Quotient Inventory”. Individual with high EQ are more likely to meet the environment demands, which Bar-On (1997) explains “Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQi) related to the potential to succeed rather than success itself”.

Daniel Goleman emotional intelligence model

Daniel Goleman is a psychologist and journalist, he had published a book called “Working with Emotional Intelligence”, and the book became the best seller on both Atlantic. In the book, he created popular emotional intelligence model as below:

Knowing One’s Emotions

Management Emotions

Motivating Oneself

Recognizing Emotions in Others

Handling Relationship

Knowing One’s Emotions: it involving self- awareness, which means recognising emotion. It is the key for managers to aware employee’s emotions; it is also cover the ability to monitor the movement of emotion.

Managing Emotions: It is the ability to handling emotions in appropriate way as process of self awareness building. It also means to give sympathy to someone or oneself when some one in difficulties, and mange to get rid of anxiety, gloom and irritability.

Motivating Oneself: Organising emotions in the service of goal is important for self-motivation and creativity. According to ( ) it help to “delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness, and being able to perform well in different works and get into the “flow” state.”

Recognising emotions in others: it is the basic interpersonal skills, such as empathy. People who have empathic awareness are accustomed to spot other’s needs and wants.

Handling Relationships: it require the skills in managing relationship and emotions, it is also the ability to interact with others effectively and smoothly.

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Emotional Intelligence & personal relationship

EQ is involved how to deal, perceive, understand and manage the emotions, it is helping individual in their relationship. In particular, for the manager to have emotional intelligence competencies, because managers need to engage with employees to achieve agreed goals, they can not work alone.

Managers with higher EQ are more likely to be in flow and happy, they able to keep the positive mood, aware the negative mood, have better social life, and better relationship with subordinates. Because, higher EQ managers are able to motivate others through effective teamwork, encourage subordinate to achieve the pleasurable goals.

Manger with lower EQ are likely express their feels and emotions in inappropriate way, they face trouble reading the body language, and low sensitivity about their and others feelings and emotion. Mangers with lower EQ whose tend to use authority to create the distance between themselves and subordinates, which is unfavourable for the organisation.

Emotional Intelligence & transformational leadership

Transformational leadership seen as ( ) “the ability to bring about significant change.” It is relevant in the context of change management. As claimed ( ) “transformational leaders able to manage changes in organisation’s strategy, culture, as well as employee’s motivation”. Transformational leaders provide more freedom to employees, they focus on the intangible element, for instance the vision, value, building solid relationships, rather than controlling the employee by rules, incentives, power. Moreover, the emotional intelligence plays a critical role in the transformational leadership. There are four characteristics for transformational leader when they adopt emotional intelligence.

The transformational leader able to provide a vision which desired in the future, it is the vision significantly better and appropriate than other ones. By using emotional intelligence ability, leaders communicate to employees in the way that the difficulties of change can be solved and the effort of change is worth.

Transformational leadership moves employee more motivated, employees given opportunity to control, transformational leaders able to motivate employees focus on their own mission and goals, also define the boundaries within it which employee can accomplish it in the relative degree of freedom.

Transformational leadership shift the employee’s concerns from the lower hierarchy of needs (physical needs, safety needs )to higher hierarchy of needs(self-esteem and self-actualization), which means the transformational leader not only meet the lower need through better salary, better working place, these leaders with emotional intelligence also pay attention to employee’s attitude in terms of personal growth and development.

Transformational leaders motivate employees to do more than others, which encourage them to go beyond the self- interests to contribute the organisation. Emotional intelligence transformational leaders able to create the awareness of importance of changes, therefore when the employees admire their leaders, they have high level of trust in transformational leaders, they are positive and confidence about the changes confronted, it leads to willing contribute the organisation beyond the self-interest.

Emotional Intelligence & Leadership skills

As ( ) found that “a leader with high EQ is more effective than a leader with high cognitive capability, leaders with high EQ know and understand the secrets of the heart, they have developed what called an educated heart, a sense of personal and social responsibility.” Therefore, Leaders with higher emotional intelligence performance better in certain skills, three main significant skills mentioned below:

Self-awareness: it enable managers to accurate understand their strength and weakness, self awareness is also related to impulse control and tolerance stress. High EQ managers should able to cope with the difficult and challenging situation.

Care Employee: it involves making the ease environment, and making employee relax. It is help to manager control impulse with regard to anger and others emotion, and make employee happy while they work, as a result to increase better teamwork and productivity.

Relationship building skills: it is ability to build the relationship with people around which involve inside and outside the organisation. It also involve impulse control and stress tolerance skills, which is the key to in interpersonal managers, it is similar concept as above mentioned “Daniel Goleman emotional intelligence model”.

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Critics of Emotional Intelligence

Goleman (1995) claims that “if we look at sets variables of emotional intelligence – persistence, warmth, optimism and so forth. We can predict important life outcomes”. The way to interpret the claim is that people with more emotional intelligence traits are likely to be success in the life or workplace. The different traits such as empathy motivation, assertive, tolerance, optimistic, sociability, attention to details, extroversion and so forth, contribute to success. However, Barrick and Mount (1991) carried out research of 24.000 workers, they found top three personality trait which related to emotional intelligence traits which mentioned above. They found altruism and modesty were not related to job success, and extroversion, it include the good feeling and warmth were not predict the success for lawyers, teachers, although it is work in sales people. In addition, some of the series of traits may conflict, for instance people with higher demand to goals may have lower in cooperation, furthermore , it is not necessary means that organisation to recruit employee with higher emotional intelligence can be success, because when HR department prepare the job description, according to ( )” traits such as “people skills”, initiative, and “persuasiveness” appear in 67% of job description.”. So, Goleman’s claim regarding emotional intelligence is seem like overblown, people with higher emotional intelligence can not be predicted the future success.

Secondly, Goleman (1998) claims that “Outstanding leaders’ emotional competencies make up to 85% to 100% of the competencies crucial for success”. It not necessary true , because leader not only need to have emotional intelligence, they are also look for opportunity to allow them to lead effectively, and the success leaders always looking for better way to improve their performance. However, as ( ) mentioned “clearly, there is link between an individual’s ability to manage and generate emotions and leadership”. In other hand ( ) discuss that “the important of individualized consideration as an aspect of transformational leadership and identify charisma as an aspect of leadership.” It means that individual consideration and charisma also the important factor for success leadership.


Overall, in the first part report, it has clear analysis the relation between change management and emotional intelligence, the organisation need to deal with changes all the time, they need to adopt appropriate strategy, structure, procedures to manage change, the report also mention the change management models, such as Kanter’s 10 commandments, Pettigrew 5 factors, Kotter’s 8 failure and success factors, and SARA model.

At the second part, it focus on how managers communicate undergoing changing process, the way to aware and monitor employee’s emotion, the conception of emotional intelligence has been introduced, the different definition also been stressed. Moreover, the theories of emotional intelligence also been listed, it provide the clear picture for managers in what extent and how to utilise the emotional intelligence.

The third part of the report, has critical analysis the relationship among emotional intelligence, personal relationship, transformational leadership, leadership skills. It is the way to examine the emotional intelligence in other perspectives. The advantage and disadvantage side of the emotional intelligence in relation to transformational leadership, and the skills need for emotional intelligence managers.

At the last part, the critics of emotional intelligence has been arise, the argument been made regarding the claim of Daniel Goleman. First claim about the “variable of emotional intelligence can predict the important life outcome”. The report has provided the examples and other author’s research to argue the thesis. As result, the emotional intelligence has overstated, people with higher emotional intelligence can not predict the future success. The second claim said the “Outstanding leaders’ emotional competencies make up to 85% to 100% of the competencies crucial for success”. It is the only significant factor related to leader’s success, it is one of many among important factors.


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