RELATIONSHIP OF EI & LOC WITH LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS & COPING STRATEGY: A CULTURAL APPROACH

Abstract

Globalization, internationalization, and advances in information technology have linked the organizations and countries in an unprecedented way. Pursuing leadership in this era of liberalization is, undoubtedly, a daunting challenge. These challenges pressurize the leaders, politicians, managers, entrepreneurs to revise their roles. Amongst all, leaders of the public as well as private organizations are the ones who are loaded with more responsibilities as cultural, political and economic differences constitute significant barriers to international understanding. They have to work with people from different cultures, plan the strategy for the international market, and face the competition at the global level. In revising the role of a global leader, a new approach including the emotional, behavioral and cognitive aspect is required. Against this background, the present study aims to extend the understanding of role of EI and LOC in effective leadership and managing stress required for international leadership in this 21 century. Therefore the present research is an attempt to study the relationship of Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Locus of Control (LOC) with Leadership Effectiveness and Coping Strategies from Indian culture perspective. Though some of the studies on leadership and EI have been undertaken in the western countries, these are not applicable directly to our country because of socioeconomic, cultural and environmental differences in India. Most of the studies done on the leaders are focused on personality only but there is very little research that has been conducted relating personality, EI and coping strategies in cultural context. As a result, there exists a gap in our knowledge and therefore, it was proposed to undertake an in depth and systematic research in this direction to bridge the gap. (ii) The main objective of the research is to find out the relationship of EI and LOC with Leadership Effectiveness and Coping Strategy of the Indian leaders in the public sector. Initially, study was conducted on 400 subjects, executives ranking Additional General Manger and above, from public sectors mainly BHEL, NIH, and other Public Sector Units. Out of which, 200 were selected on the basis of high and low EI and external and internal LOC. Four instruments are used mainly to measure Leadership Effectiveness, Emotional Intelligence, Coping Strategies and Locus of Control namely: LEAD (Leader Effectiveness and Adaptability Description Questionnaire) Hersey and Blanchard (1974), Emotional Intelligence Scale (Schutte (1998)), Brief COPE (Carver C.S. (1997)., LOC (Locus of Control) (Julian Rotter (1966).The obtained raw scores were decoded and fed to the computer to form the database. SPSS for windows (12.0 version) has been used to calculate the mean age of the sample, Ql and Q3 statistics for computing High EI and Low EI. The scores falling below Ql indicate low EI and scores falling above Q3 indicate high EI, t statistics, Correlation and Ordinal Regression. Correlation analysis is used in conjunction with Ordinal regression analysis as the correlation explains covariation and Ordinal regression indicates the strength of covariation. The most interesting and challenging findings of the present research is no significant relation of EI with leadership effectiveness has been observed. Most of the researches claim positive relationship of EI and leadership effectiveness. Contrary to the previous researches, this finding supports the Mayer's' assertion to study EI in different cultural contexts. Leung (2005) has also found that EI does not prove effective for the leaders in the Chinese culture rather it has been proved as a bane. The results of the present research are very interesting and intriguing. Starting with the EI, it is positively related to the problem focused, emotion focused, others coping strategy. With the (iii) sub categories, positive relation has been found with active coping, instrumental support, planning, emotional support, positive reframing, and acceptance and negative relation has been found with substance use, self blame. However, no significant relation has been found with self-distraction, denial, humor and religion. The results obtained reveals that EI is related with coping strategy and on that basis it can be concluded that leaders with high EI prefer using different coping strategies dealing with the stress in the organization as compared to leaders with low EI. Further the ordinal regression analyses explicate the percentage of effect on the coping strategy. It has been found that the effect of EI is quite low on different coping strategy. The optimum level EI can affect the use of coping strategies is 12%. The major implication of the study is that the effect of EI on the use of coping strategies by leaders ranges from 2-12% only. These findings are in line with Mayer's assertion that EI can affect only 5-10% on the behavioral aspects. Positive relationship has been found between LOC and leadership effectiveness. Once again through this relationship it has been established that personality variables are better predictors of effective leadership. It can be implied from the research that Internals are effective leaders than externals. LOC is positively related to emotion focused, others coping strategy while no significant relation with problem focused coping strategies has been found. With sub categories, positive relationship has been found with humor, denial, emotional support, acceptance, religion, behavioral disengagement, venting, and self blame. The results obtained shows that External leaders prefer others coping and emotional coping strategies over problem focused coping strategies as compared to Internals. The overall impact of LOC on the use of coping strategies by leaders is quietlow which ranges from 2-6% except for religion and venting. Comparing the (iv) effect of EI and LOC on leadership effectiveness and coping strategy, it can be implied that these two construct are not similar but are different constructs in the system of personality.