Increasing emotional intelligence of employees: Evidence from research and development teams in Taiwan

Although the concept of emotional intelligence has captured the interest of researchers and the wider public, the mechanism by which transformational leadership exerts its influence on the development of emotional intelligence behavior of followers remains relatively unexplored. In this study we proposed a latent growth model, recruiting 342 employees from Taiwan information technology firms at multiple time points over a 6-month period to test the proposed model. The findings showed that, compared with their coworkers, those employees who perceived their leaders as demonstrating more transformational leadership at Time 1, were more likely than others to develop increases in emotional intelligence behavior over time, which consequently improved their task performance and led to the development of an increase in their organizational citizenship behaviors.