Last Updated on 03/02/2023 by Admin
Your goal for this assignment is to develop a plan to increase motivation, satisfaction, and performance in the workplace through the use of foundational principles associated
This module focuses on the impact that emotional intelligence has on decision making. Additionally, the module highlights biases in decision making, as well as emotional influences on decision making.
Your goal for this assignment is to develop a plan to increase motivation, satisfaction, and performance in the workplace through the use of foundational principles associated with emotional intelligence. You must highlight the key elements of emotional intelligence that increase follower motivation and performance. Also, describe the potential biases that could impact leadership decision making and make recommendations to overcome the leadership biases. There are links to self assessments in the lecture that may provide food for thought as you develop your plan. Address the following in your paper/plan:
- Provide a brief summary of the attributes associated with EQ.
- Describe how you would embody each of those attributes.
- Develop a means for employing the plan to increase motivation, satisfaction, and performance in the workplace.
- Share specifics on the potential advantages and disadvantages of your plan.
Assignment Requirements:
- Your paper should be 4-5 pages in length, not counting the required title and references pages.
Expert Answer and Explanation
Impact of Emotions on Decision-Making
Organizations make decisions and motivate employees with focus on improving their performance. This implies that decision-making as well as encouraging of workers can help a firm perform in alignment with the firm’s expectations. For an organization to achieve this alignment, it needs to know how to act or make decision, and this is important in the sense that it helps avoid mistakes which may hamper performance.
When considering using decision-making and motivation to drive performance, an entity has to be aware of the factors which may affect the effectiveness or impact of the two (O’Connor et al., 2019). A decision maker has to understand that biases can affect decision-making, and the elements of emotional intelligence (EI) can enhance or hamper motivation as this study highlights.
Elements of Emotional Intelligence that help motivate Followers
The elements of EI can help improve the followers’ motivation and performance. As an example of these elements, self-awareness plays a crucial in terms of motivating individuals. When one is self-aware, they can intuitively reasons, and rather than act in a manner that hurts others, they make decisions with focus on helping support others, and this motivates the follower (Boyatzis, 2018).
Self-management, still, can help a leader motivate the people they lead. A leader can demonstrate this element by restraining from using words which can hurt others’ feelings. Instead, they approach issues with calm, and this help improve the leader-follower relationship. Accordingly, the employees gain motivation, and support the leader (Boyatzis, 2018).
Social-awareness is another element that can help optimize a leader’s capacity to encourage people in their team. A leader that exhibits this quality or element makes efforts to get to know about others’ perspectives regarding cultural practices. Such a leader discards the notion that their perspective is undisputable, and instead, they listen to others. In doing so, they encourage employees to contribute towards meeting of the performance targets.
A leader can equally use relationship management to encourage workers. This is involves adopting practices and measures focused on reducing conflicts, and engaging constructively with workers to help motivate them.
Potential Biases that can affect Leadership Decision-Making
While a leader may want to realize a certain objective by making decisions, they may fail to meet the expectations especially if there are biases involved. Anchoring, for instance, can limit a leader’s capacity to come up with the right course of action. It is noticeable in a scenario where one makes conclusion based on the information, they receive instead of considering alternative options.
The progress bias can equally affect the making of decisions. It occurs when one oversteps favorable decisions while they downplay the unfavorable decisions (Gilar-Corbi et al., 2019). An example is downsizing to save costs, and using the money saved to purchase an item that is not important to the organization.
Recommendations to Overcome Leadership Biases
Given the undesirable effects of the biases, leadership should undertake certain measures to overcome the biases. When considering making decisions, for instance, a leader should gather facts first. This is important because the lack of facts may increase the leader’s risk of making leadership mistakes due to the biases such as anchoring bias. A leader can equally overcome the bias by consulting, and seeking the views of others (Drigas & Papoutsi, 2018). This is important because employees may know what a leader does not know, and seeking the views of the former can help limit the risk of making decisions which end up hampering performance.
Attributes Associated with EQ
There are key attributes which one can associate with the EI. Self-awareness is part of the attributes. It denotes one’s capacity to recognize their flaws, strengths, and the impact of their actions on others. Another attribute is self-regulation, and an individual can demonstrate this attribute by managing their feelings as well as emotions so that they don’t annoy others. Empathy, still, is a feature that one can relate to the EI.
It describes one’s ability to understand the experiences of others. Motivation, in addition, is linked to the EI, and it means having passion in doing something, and making efforts to realize a certain objective (Reshetnikov et al., 2020). Furthermore, social skills are also some of the features of the EI. When one has these skills, they are able to manage relationships in an effective manner.
Embodying the Attributes
There are different ways in which one can embody the attributes. Creating room for other people to share their thoughts on how to manage certain tasks, for instance, provides a way of embodying the attributes. By doing this, an individual would be demonstrating the possession of the social skills as an attribute of the EI. One can also embody these attributes by restraining from taking actions which hurt the feelings of others, and this is an attribute that defines a self-aware person (Rodríguez-Ledo et al., 2018). Instead of rushing to condemn people for making mistakes, one can calmly talk to the person who committed the mistake.
Means for Employing the Plan
It is possible for a leader to motivate workers, and promote their satisfaction and performance, and it can do this by developing a plan that helps leaders learn and develop the EI attributes. The goal of the plan is to create a program that motivates leaders so that they can perform well in terms of motivating workers.
To realize the goal, the leaders will undergo training with the training covering the major elements of the EI. The resources needed include the laptop, PowerPoint presentations, projector and a whiteboard. The training will run for two weeks with daily training sessions taking 2 hours. By the end of the training, the learners should be able to apply the four attributes of the EI in managing simulated organizational issues (Poonamallee et al., 2018).
Advantages and Disadvantages of the Plan
The training plan exhibits benefits as well as flaws. This plan, for instance, has a high possibility of improving the capacity of the leaders to learn how to manage and motivate their teams of workers. The plan is simple enough, and implementing it does not present problems. However, the plan does not include the details regarding the evaluation of the outcomes. The fact that it omits evaluation of the training outcomes puts its reliability into question.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the emotions, thoughts and cognitive reasoning can affect the decisions which an individual makes. Similarly, the biases one has can influence how they make decisions, and motivate others. This underscores the need to seek the counsel of other people so as to avoid the mishaps associated with making decisions. A person can avoid these issues by embodying the aspects of the EI when making decisions. An individual in leadership role needs to make efforts to learn these attributes so that they can avoid the pitfalls of making decisions.
References
Boyatzis, R. E. (2018). The Behavioral Level of Emotional Intelligence and Its Measurement. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1438.Doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01438.
Drigas, A. S., & Papoutsi, C. (2018). A New Layered Model on Emotional Intelligence. Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland), 8(5), 45. Doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/bs8050045.
Gilar-Corbi, R., Pozo-Rico, T., Sánchez, B., & Castejón, J. L. (2019). Can emotional intelligence be improved? A randomized experimental study of a business-oriented EI training program for senior managers. PloS one, 14(10). Doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224254.
O’Connor, P. J., Hill, A., Kaya, M., & Martin, B. (2019). The Measurement of Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review of the Literature and Recommendations for Researchers and Practitioners. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 1116. Doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01116.
Poonamallee, L., Harrington, A. M., Nagpal, M., & Musial, A. (2018). Improving Emotional Intelligence through Personality Development: The Effect of the Smart Phone Application based Dharma Life Program on Emotional Intelligence. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 169. Doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00169.
Reshetnikov, V. A., Tvorogova, N. D., Hersonskiy, I. I., Sokolov, N. A., Petrunin, A. D., & Drobyshev, D. A. (2020). Leadership and Emotional Intelligence: Current Trends in Public Health Professionals Training. Frontiers in public health, 7, 413. Doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2019.00413.
Rodríguez-Ledo, C., Orejudo, S., Cardoso, M. J., Balaguer, Á., & Zarza-Alzugaray, J. (2018). Emotional Intelligence and Mindfulness: Relation and Enhancement in the Classroom with Adolescents. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2162. Doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02162.