A Cross-level Empirical Research On The Impact Of Managers’ Emotional Intelligence On Transformational Leadership

With the advent of the era of the Internet, most of the enterprises haveobtained the opportunities of rapid development, while the fierce competition isfollowed at the same time. Chinese companies have been paid much attention torecruiting and training of talents, while only retaining talents and making theemployee to fulfill duties are not enough for companies faced with the pressures ofinstitutional change, growth and competition. Enterprises need to improveemployee satisfaction, thereby enabling employees to make extra effort which gobeyond the current job requirements and are beneficial to the interests of theorganization, which may create competitive advantage, maintain the corecompetitiveness and have more opportunities. There are many factors that canencourage employees to make extra effort. The manager’s leadership style is one ofthe important influence factors. And transformational leadership is a hot spot ofleadership style research in recent years. The manager of this style makessubordinates aware of the significance and value of work, motivates employees topursue high performance and surpass organization requirements finally. Therefore,in order to help enterprises scientifically choose and cultivate managers oftransformational leadership styles, inducing factors and mechanism oftransformational leadership should be studied.By collating literatures, we found that some scholars have pointed out thatemotional intelligence, interpersonal communication competence andtransformational leadership, every two of the three variables are related. And thevast majority of researches are in the individual level. Few scholars research on mediating role of interpersonal communication competence between emotionalintelligence and transformational leadership in organization level. Therefore, inorder to avoid common method variance, this research will regard managers’emotional intelligence and interpersonal communication competence asorganizational level variables, transformational leadership of employee perceptionas individual level variable, build the model in which emotional intelligence is theindependent variable, transformational leadership is the dependent variable, andinterpersonal communication competence is mediating variable.According to the above analysis, we conduct questionnaire survey withfirst-line or middle managers and their staff in seven companies from three cities ofChangchun, Qingdao and Shijiazhuang. Managers evaluate their own emotionalintelligence and interpersonal communication competence, the staff assess whetherthe bosses have transformational leadership behavior. And SPSS19.0, Amos17.0and HLM6.02software are used for data correlation analysis and hierarchicalregression analysis. The following conclusions:(1) Manager’s emotionalintelligence has a positive effect on transformational leadership, namely themanagers of high emotional intelligence are more likely to develope thetransformational leadership style.(2) Emotional intelligence has a positive effect oninterpersonal communication competence, namely the managers of high emotionalintelligence usually have high interpersonal communication competence.(3)Interpersonal communication competence has a positive effect on transformationalleadership, namely the managers of high interpersonal communication competenceare also easy to develope a transformational leadership style.(4) Interpersonalcommunication competence play a partial mediating role between emotionalintelligence and transformational leadership, namely the positive influence ofmanagers’ emotional intelligence on transformational leadership is partial byinterpersonal communication competence indirectly. When recruiting and selecting managers, the enterprises should investigate notonly managers’ professional ability, but also their ability to perceive, control andutilize emotions. Through continuous on-the-job training, the managers’interpersonal communication competence can be improved constantly.