Linking emotional intelligence abilities and transformational leadership styles

Today's business environment is changing tremendously due to economic forces that result in the redesign of systems to decrease cost, the need to speed up product development and the focused attention on satisfying customers. These conditions have caused organizations to utilize project management to implement strategic initiatives through projects. By utilizing a “big picture” systems approach to analyze how the system components interact, decisions can be made which are in the “best interest” of the overall project. Project management is ideally matched to this business environment. The study addressed 24 project managers and their associated projects in six organizations from varied industries. The results of the study found that a project manager's transformational leadership style has a positive impact on actual project performance, that emotional intelligence ability contributes to a project manager's transformational leadership style and subsequent actual project performance.