Research areas

In this study we advance a contextual framework of Emotional and Social Competencies (ESC) antecedents, whereby we study the relationship between ESC and McLelland's (1973) social motives. This endeavour has emerged from the growing awareness that the underlying and often mysterious motives of human behaviour poise considerable challenges to managers, team leaders, mentors and coaches alike. Since their ability to lead effectively by steering others to self-direct themselves and engage into intentional change (see Boyatzis, 2006), critically depends on how deep and sound is their understanding of others' behaviour; what motives lie hidden behind it and what inspires and triggers them to act. Moreover, as once pointed out by Woodruffe (1993), a crucial aspect for the development of ESC competencies lies in the understanding of the antecedents (i.e. motives) of human behaviour. We thus advance a study whereby we test a mapping proposal (Guillén, 2007) that corresponds individual ESC profiles to three key social motives (namely: achievement, power and affiliation motives; see MCLelland, 1973) that trigger human action.

In a previous project (SEJ2006-10017) we developed a survey instrument to assess emotional and social competencies, carefully adapted to the Spanish context. For this purpose, we reviewed every questionnaire on both EI and ESC, such as EQ-i (Bar-On, 1988), ECI-2 (Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2002), MSCEIT (Mayer, Salovey et al., 2003), TEIQue (Petrides & Furnham, 2001) and the EIQ (Dulewicz, Higgs & Slaski, 2003). In result, we obtained a data bank of items (indicators) per each of the selected competencies that was then refined by means of pilot tests. In our current project granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN; EDU2010-15250), among other studies we propose to further test our measurement instrument.

In alignment with the recent Bologna reform set to harmonize EU higher education, our third research topic focuses on assessing the middle to long-term success of our graduate ESC development course, the LEAD Programme. We are thus interested in conducting an outcome research that identifies the impact that a leadership development course, offered in the context of business management graduate and executive programmes, may have on raising students' ESC profiles.

This project tests the GEC theory and its role in facilitating team performance. It also examines the individual level emotional and social competencies that lead to the emergence of team-level emotional competence, i.e. the exhibition of emotionally competent group norms (ECGNs; Druskat & Wolff, 2001). By designing this project in a cross-cultural fashion that compares samples from the US, Spain and China, we will look onto identifying differences and similarities of top performing GEC profiles among culturally diverse student populations. We expect that the dissemination of our findings will helps managers acknowledge the role of emotional awareness and emotional management in fostering team effectiveness. Moreover, knowledge about cross-cultural differences in emotion-focused team norms will help inform theory and practice on developing effective leadership in cross-cultural teams.

Our second project within the GEC research line is set to explore the effects that group emotional competencies have on dependent variables besides group performance, for instance other increasingly valued work-life outcomes such as Subjective Well-Being (SWB; see Diener et al., 1999; Diener, 2004). Research on SWB, or more colloquially, happiness, has grown extensively in recent years to include other related concepts such as morale, job satisfaction and other quality of life measures. Indeed, while making the case for the recently emerged field of Positive Organizational Behaviour (POB; see Luthans, 2002a and the Journal of Organizational Behavior Special Issue of February 2009), the growing attention given to research on subjective well-being reflects an overall trend in most societies to value happiness over money. In close alignment to this trend, we investigate whether the development of group emotional competence may positively affect a group-level sense of well being. For this matter, we advance the conceptualization of group well-being (GWB) as a group-level construct of well-being - one that shifts the focus out from individual "trait-like" conceptions of SWB, and into "state-like" understandings of well-being, more permeable to shared behavior and experiences among peers rather than individual personalities.

To promote the subsequent application of our GEC related research findings, this project is an all in one research study/product development application for managing task uncertainty and complexity in teamwork contexts. We depart from the Teamwork Intelligence model (TWI; Zamora, 2009), a model of group functional and emotional competencies that has been observed in teamwork settings. This model has been identified by induction, from data collected during a 5-year training course for managing executives that targeted the organizational development of work groups. Through an entertaining dynamic, based on a group interaction training game, Synergy ®, team members are asked to take decisions in an environment of initial uncertainty and increasing complexity. It is thus from the observation of group behavior as occurring in a group interaction simulation, that we can identify patterns of behavior, i.e. norms, that have been observed as systematically associated with highly performing teams.