The Hidden Ingredients of Team Performance : A conceptual model for emotional intelligence, self-leadership and team performance

Abstract: Due to globalization and increasing complexity within the business environment, teams have become a way of life for many organizations in order to generate higher performance and sustain competitive advantage. Organizations, however, may fail to fully benefit from teams despite all the investment and efforts that they make. Herein, we believe that a possible way to cope with these failures might be establishing an understanding that individuals’, particularly team members’ need for autonomy within teams through accomplishing self-discipline and managing their emotions and behaviors. Therefore, our purpose in this study is to investigate the relationship between individuals’ emotional intelligence and their self-leadership ability in the context of team performance. In line with this purpose, we find plausible to employ conceptual research approach in order to build an integrated and logical model, with proposed hypotheses, which could be used as a departure point for the researchers and their empirical studies in the future. Through this model, we argue that individuals’ emotional intelligence has a positive impact on the self-leadership ability and its three strategies, which are behavior focus strategy, natural reward strategy, and constructive thought patterns strategy, by managing and regulating one’s own and other’s emotions. Hence, as suggested, the association of emotional intelligence and self-leadership can influence team communication, team trust, team learning and team creativity positively thus it may enhance the overall team performance.