Managers are expected to lead their departments, manage their staff and achieve their objectives to ensure the success of their organizations. Some researchers emphasize that leaders and managers alone influence the organizations’ overall performance, while others argue that besides the existence of such influence, the state of the economy and the attractiveness of organizations’ products and services also contribute to the overall performance of the organizations. Some leaders and managers are almost exclusively judged by their ability to meet organizational objectives and thus improve the overall performance of the organizations. Some studies have argued that organizations led by high-performing leaders showed a significantly increased ability to reach their organizational targets. This may, of course, depend a lot on the organizational structure and leader’s role, and in particular on the organizational objectives set. If these objectives are too ambitious, it can be very difficult for any leader to ensure their achievement.

Many scholars and practitioners have discussed how and why great leaders are seen to be effective; they often refer to the leaders’ strategy, vision, or great ideas. Nevertheless, the truth about being a great leader may be much more basic. Great leaders work through emotions. Observers of leadership often consider that leaders’ success depends on how they work, no matter what the required task: whether it is creating a vision, a mission, a strategy or even simply putting their teams into action. However, if great leaders perform their work competently, but fail in the task of driving emotions in the right direction, nothing they do will necessarily work in the way they intended. Emotional appeal has been seen as a kind of glue which bonds people together in a team and such emotions, if not considered, can lead to failure regardless of the leader’s apparent skills and level of knowledge and competence in the technicalities of the job.

Many researchers have tackled the issue of the importance and role of an emotional leader who is expected to be able to best utilize his/her emotional intelligence to lead a successful team towards achieving the organizational objectives. Emotional intelligence has been widely defined as leaders being able to monitor their own and others’ feelings and emotions, to differentiate among these different emotional states and to use their insights to guide and inform their thinking and actions, especially in their relationships. Obviously, the presence of emotional intelligence can be vital as a tool for any leader, since it can help in improving productivity and morale through reducing stress and motivating employees, potentially helping them in establishing consensus and developing their mental and soft skills.

Who Is an Effective Leader, Ways of Measuring Leadership Effectiveness