The Emotional Side of Innovation : The Role of Leader’s Emotional Intelligence in influencing Innovation Implementation

Abstract: Today’s organizations struggle to remain competitive within the contemporary turbulent business environment and are therefore demanded to develop and implement new working processes. Organizations, although striving for innovation, frequently fail to fully benefit from them due to implementation failures. An often-disregarded issue is the entanglement of emotions during this phase. Thus, this thesis aims to investigate how innovation implementation is related to emotions, addressing it towards the team’s working climate and leader’s emotional intelligence. For this purpose, we employ a conceptual research approach to build an integrated conceptual model that, by proposing hypotheses and propositions, may serve as a starting point for future empirical studies. With this model, we suggest that leaders with higher levels of emotional intelligence, by the mindful management of emotions, can consciously influence the emotional contagion process and therefore affect the team climate. By establishing a climate for innovation characterized by a team vision, participative safety, task orientation and support for innovation, emotionally intelligent leaders can thus positively influence innovation implementation. The thesis does thereby contribute to an understanding of the factors that affect innovation implementation within teams.