Managers’ Emotional Intelligence Key To Fostering Employees’ Creativity.

Companies are realizing that employees creativity is a powerful source of profit. Some managers, however, are better at fostering that creativity than others. Researchers at Rice are conducting pioneering work that indicates that supervisors with high levels of emotional intelligence can have a substantial impact on creativity in the workplace.

Researchers at Rice University contend that leaders who are high on emotional intelligence are able to understand their employees’ feelings and take the steps needed to give them the courage, optimism and enthusiasm to be creative.

“More often it’s the supervisor with a high level of emotional intelligence who is able to elicit new and useful ideas or solutions from employees,” says Jing Zhou, an associate professor of management in Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management.

In an article for The Leadership Quarterly titled “Awakening Employee Creativity: The Role of Leader Emotional Intelligence,” Zhou and Jones School colleague Jennifer George provide the first study to focus on the emotional intelligence of managers and its role in encouraging creativity.

The authors theorize that supervisors have a substantial influence on creativity in the workplace from the moment a problem or opportunity is identified to the time it is revised or implemented. Not only do they need to behave in ways that encourage and support creativity, Zhou says. They also need to have the ability to understand how their behavior may foster or inhibit creativity in others.

Zhou and George believe this ability stems from individuals’ emotional intelligence – how accurately they perceive, appraise and express their own emotions and those experienced by others; how effectively they are able to focus on important concerns, while remaining flexible in the face of competing and similar options; and how well they manage both their emotions and their employees’ feelings. Oftentimes, the researchers found that employers tell their employees they want them to be creative, but ultimately don’t encourage them or define what they mean.

“Our theory indicates that leaders with high levels of emotional intelligence will excel at stimulating and encouraging their followers to identify and act on opportunities for creativity,” Zhou says.

Additionally, leaders with high emotional intelligence are better able to manage tensions and conflicts between co-workers who are collaborating in creative endeavors, and they are more likely to know when and how creativity should be permitted and nurtured in the workplace. Emotional intelligence also can enable managers to pinpoint and channel employee frustrations or other negative emotions into identifying problems and opportunities for improvements. When it comes to information gathering, a high level of emotional intelligence will help leaders to stimulate their employees to be open to different kinds of information.

“Through their words and actions, leaders can convey that information gathering is a waste of time or a valued way of keeping current, being exposed to different ways of thinking and coming up with creative ideas,” Zhou says.

The researchers also claim that leaders with high emotional intelligence are more able to promote a team-based sense of collective ownership when employees communicate their ideas, get feedback and possibly revise their ideas.

Prior studies on creativity have tended to focus on aspects of the work environment that inhibit creativity, particularly with regard to employees in research and development. Instead, Zhou and George, who believe there is potential for creativity in a wide variety of jobs, elected to examine factors that foster creativity.

“There’s evidence to suggest that leadership behaviors can be taught – that individuals can be trained in this way,” Zhou says. “Researchers are just beginning to investigate the best ways and under what conditions leaders’ emotional intelligence can be elevated.”

A founding member of the Asia Academy of Management and of the International Association on Chinese Management Research (IACMR), Zhou has served as chair of the Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management Track of the Academy of International Business and co-chair of IACMR. She also has been elected to serve as a representative-at-large of the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. She has served as a consultant to a number of organizations on issues related to employee creativity.

In addition to organizational behavior, international management and leadership, she teaches a course in the Jones School’s Executive MBA program titled “Managing for Creativity and Innovation,” in which she provides training to managers and leaders on how to develop their own creativity and that of their employees.

Zhou has contributed to several books on employee creativity, and her research is widely published in top research journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Management and Personnel Psychology. She serves or will be serving on the editorial boards of several top research journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, the Journal of Applied Psychology and the Journal of Management.

For more information at http://www.rice.edu