Assessing and training leaders' emotional intelligence, and testing its influence on leaders' employees.

The recent literature places emotions at the center of leadership construed as a dynamic process. The present study, with an experimental pre-post design that included an experimental group formed by leaders and their employees, and a control group of employees whose leaders were not assessed, tested whether Self-reported leaders' emotional intelligence (LEI) are congruent with Other-reported LEI, and whether a brief self-administered training program would affect self- and other-reported LEI assessment, as well as Job involvement and Life satisfaction in leaders' employees. At Time 1, leaders of the experimental-group and employees of both the experimental and control group filled in the Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI; Boyatzis, Goleman, & Rhee, 2000) - leaders filled in the Self-reported version; employees filled in the Other-reported version, i.e., rated their leader. All employees evaluated their own Job involvement and Life satisfaction too. At Time 2 (after training experimental-group leaders), experimental-group leaders and both experimental- and control-group employees again rated LEI using ECI; all employees evaluated their own Job involvement and Life satisfaction too. The results overall showed a significant impact of the training on Time 2 measures in the experimental group, both as regards its effect on self- and other-reported LEI assessments, and on employees' outcomes. In particular, Time 2 showed an increase in leaders' ECI Self-assessed Conflict Management and in Other-assessed Service Orientation competencies, and in employees’ Job involvement. The study overall indicates that training leaders’ emotional intelligence can diminish discrepancies in self- and other-reported LEI assessment and increase employees’ positive outcomes.