Effect of emotional intelligence on transformational leadership behavior

In the past, rationality was seen as the main factor that leads to organizational success and emotions were ignored. But today, the rapid changes created an organizational environment, whose challenge can't be met by using rationality alone. In this environment, emotional intelligence comes on the scene as a principal factor that effects people's and organizations' success. Parallel to the growing importance of emotional intelligence in organizations, leadership approaches also began to change. Today's organizations are leaving the transactional leadership behaviours that depends on only rationality and moving towards transformational leadership behaviours that takes emotional dimensions into consideration. Because of its structure, transformational leadership behaviour approach is directly affected by emotional intelligence. In this study, in the first section basic terms concerning emotions and intelligence and models of emotional intelligence are defined. In the second section, leadership is defined, leadership theories are examined and the reasons of transformational leadership for being the most effective neo-charismatic leadership theory are explained. In the third section, the relationship between emotional intelligence and transformational leadership is explained and the theoretical framework for examining this relationship is constructed. In the fourth section research methodology is defined. In the fifth and the sixth parts, research findings are explained and compared with study's hypothesis. Research's sample data consists of 106 managers and 32 academic personnel that were chosen by non-random sampling method. Results show that there is a positive relationship between emotional intelligence dimensions and transformational leadership behaviour dimensions. Especially, the social skills dimension of emotional intelligence has a great impact on transformational leadership behaviour dimensions. Also, there are other findings that shows a person's emotional intelligence and transformational leadership behaviour changes according to his/her job and effect of emotional intelligence dimensions on transformational leadership behaviour dimensions change according to his/her job.