Recent leadership failures in several popular organizations have drawn increased attention to the reality that achieving goals through employee performance is only one part of the formula for success. Another critical piece in this equation is the way leaders do it which impacts employees, and ultimately relationships. Leaders who are low on self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and interpersonal skills. They lack something called “emotional intelligence” (EI/EQ), a model popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman. EI is a set of social and emotional abilities that help an individual achieve both personal and professional success.
For a long, HR managers and professional training heads know what distinguishes an average employee from a star. It isn’t essentially just intelligence, it is something different, which was earlier difficult to describe, and was called people skill. Nowadays the phrase “people skills” is replaced with a systematic term called emotional intelligence. Thus, in this article, we are going to talk about emotional intelligence ethics in the workplace.
Following emotional intelligence ethics at the workplace is a critical tool for handling moral challenges in business ethics. Emotions are important contributors to ethical decision-making at work. The two components of emotional intelligence play a role in this decision-making; the cognitive component that facilitates accurate perceptions of others’ emotions and the empathy component that contributes to the understanding of others’ emotions by sharing their experiences.
Individuals with high emotional intelligence wok are more skillful at reasoning and regulating their emotions and the behavior of others. They use this information to guide their own thinking and behavior. Such people are more likely to guide themselves towards ethical thought and actions through their emotional competencies. Therefore, individuals with high EI are better able to manage their emotions and react less impulsively and aggressively to others.
Those who follow EI ethics in the workplace, facilitate creations that fully unleash human potential. It is also believed that such teams are even more powerful than those at the top in the hierarchical structure. The characteristics of an emotionally intelligent organization may include customer-oriented, pliability, learning and growth, accountability, and team dedication. Today the new business mantra is “What do you need to be the best you can be?”. Through this, the ethical attitude of the organization enhances, which in turn helps facilitate social justice and respect, and the emotional competencies of the employees enhance.
Empathy, one of the core competencies of emotional intelligence, is an essential component to enhance selflessness and sympathy. These tendencies help to encourage and foster ethical attitudes and actions in organizations. Also, emotional intelligence may restrict the unethical attitudes or actions in the organization by some groups of employees. A disadvantage may be that abilities such as empathy and interpersonal skills including persuasion may be available at the hands of deceitful types of people, who might use emotional intelligence skills to deceive or manipulate them. They may make use of their social skills to climb the hierarchy by lowering others in the organization. Thus, for the success of any business or organization, emotional intelligence is one of the basic ingredients.
Ethical concerns have been the subject of attention by management and business literature for a long time now, where ethics represents a set of standards that seek to define what is “good and moral”, and a set of principles and values that guide behavior in a society. For organizations, it is important that they are aware of the benefits of this concept, now seen as a critical success factor, that is, emotional intelligence. In the world of business, the use of emotion can either be genuine or simply a strategy to achieve the goals pursued. It is highly important to follow emotional intelligence ethics in the workplace, not only for employee productivity but for the success of the organization as a whole.