Abstract
This paper, is aimed at reviewing literature on the topic of soft skills and emotional intelligence employed by the project leaders in order to improve the outcome of the people working under them. The paper starts with an introduction about the topic while highlighting few soft skills that are exhibited at the workplace environment. The paper then proceeds to reviewing literature available on the topic of soft skills in project leaders. Few books, articles and researches have been selected for inclusion in the literature review. A brief review of each source is mentioned in the literature review section of the paper while highlighting the main points of each source. The paper is concluded by a brief conclusion while summarizing main points of literature reviewed while presenting the gap present in the research studies.
Introduction
Emotional Intelligence is the term used to describe the ability of a person to understand his own and other people’s emotions in a given situation. It also includes usage of information pertaining to emotions for guiding the thinking process. Soft skill is a term related to Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ) of a person including his personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, and a positive attitude including thinking with people. Soft skills are of a complementary nature against the hard skills. Hard skills include a person’s professional skills whereas soft skills are related to interpersonal skills. There is a large number of soft skills that can be adopted by project leaders at workplace to improve productivity of employees .
Soft skills are the skills that exist in a person’s personality that enable him to win other people’s heart while influencing them to a great extent. Soft skills have a psychological effect as well on others. It enhances a person’s capabilities, qualities, dealings and habits which result in his conceptual approach and personality development. There is a common saying that the common sense is not that common. The Soft skills are showed by the EQ level of a person. EQ is embedded in the personal conflict resolving, dealing, and friendliness. While it results in hard skills which are quite related to the person’s IQ level known as Intelligence Quotient, EQ becomes an essential part of mind by practicing the soft skills over a long period of time
A number of soft skills are mentioned below :-
1. Self-Awareness: Self-awareness is a soft skill which is considered almost essential at every workplace. If the project leader is a self-aware person who understand his own emotional responses towards situation then it becomes easy for him to make decisions while avoiding any emotional interference from himself.
3. Self-Management: Self-management is an essential soft skill for project leaders since they are the ones seen by workers as the project managers. If a project leader is unable to manage himself then it is highly unlikely that he will be able to manage the whole project successfully.
4. Social-Awareness: Social-awareness is about a person’s ability to understand the social norms of a society. If a project leader is a well socially aware person then the people who work under him would feel comfortable.
6. Relationship Management: In today’s era of modern business and project management, relationship management is considered the most powerful tool for attaining goals efficiently. The efficiency and productivity of people are highly affected by the relationship they have with the project leader. A project leader becomes more persuasive and influential to the people through employing good relationship management techniques.
Many other soft skills that help in building up motivation and improving productivity of workers include personal energy, positive work ethic, interpersonal skills, motivational skills, willingness to learn, common sense, good personal appearance, commitment to continued training and learning, and good communication skills.
There may be a set of several soft skills from above ones that are required to be adopted by professionals in the workplace. Project leaders can enhance the motivation level of their subordinates through adopting suitable soft skills. In this paper, a literature review of some credible research studies on the subject of soft skills is presented.
Literature Review
The study talks about a six organizations and a total of twenty-four projects in these organizations from different industries. The data collection instruments of the study include use of MLQ Form the 5X Leadership Style Questionnaire, the Emotional Intelligence Ability Test, Perrow’s Non-Routine Activities and Project Performance Questions. Team members, project managers, and the stakeholders responded to these questions relating to their specific project, and organization various executives were interviewed in order to provide a view point on the past projects. Results of this study show that the leadership style that is used by a project manager and their emotional intelligence traits increase the chances of successfully accomplishing complex projects. Laissez-faire transformational and leadership styles and the overall emotional intelligence depicted in this study about a significant relationship as a project performance. The transformational leader’s behavior was found in this study to be of enhancement in the project performance and productivity to a great degree whereas transactional leader failed to do so.
This study showed that there is a number of links between emotional intelligence and leadership style. The overall emotional intelligence or EQ and the comprehension of emotions related to tasks of emotional intelligence were also found to relate to a great extent with the inspirational motivation component of the transformational leadership. Additionally, the strategic field of emotional intelligence was also found to relate to a great extent with the attributed ideal influence and the individual consideration parts of the transformational leadership. The transformational leaders are considered in this study as those leaders who possess a large number of soft skills to inspire their workers.
This study was aimed at investigating about the relationship between leadership behaviors and emotional intelligence skills using input from 578 project management professionals. The method of research was quantitative research that used an electronic survey method consisting of questions of general nature in order to gather the demographic data, the level of Bar-On EQ, and included a Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire in order to gather leadership skill and emotional intelligence profiles. The stepwise multiple regression analysis technique used in this study showed that eight (8) of the fifteen (15) EQ skills were mostly found to be explaining a significant amount of variance in the transformational leadership behaviors. The results of the correlation coefficient in this study showed that the total emotional intelligence (EQ) accounts for about 44% of the change in the transformational leadership behaviors. This study findings indicated that developing eight emotional intelligence characteristics in the project managers ensured cumulative, and long-term benefits to organizations while managing their projects. This study contributes toward the positive social change in project management field by introducing a paradigm that highlights how interpersonal or soft skills of the project managers play important roles in the project success, along with the traditional Project Management Institute’s constraints of schedule, cost, and quality.
This study is about social intelligence in project management that amounts to soft skills in the field. This study starts with stating the fact that most project leaders come from a technical background and normally exhibit engineering mentality. Principally, they are familiar to predictable, organized, logical, detailed, well structured, and completely standardized environment that is governed by some controllable variables and objective rules. The study states that it is not a surprising thing that these leaders tend to apply their previous same logic to the fuzzy, unpredictable, disorganized, intuitive, subjective and emotional world of the human interaction. These logical arguments work well with the machinery and science but it is almost impossible to work with the same logical arguments in a situation with humans involved in them. In case of managing people, the system can’t be simply of paper based environment hence requiring additional skills that are not defined by specific set of rules in the book. These skills are known as soft skills in the field. The dynamic and flexible system of applying soft skills at workplace is required to adjust, grow and develop like a living entity. It should be a relatively fairly operational system rather than reaching towards a perfect system that does not operate at all. This study also states that whenever applying highly standardized and complex project management agendas, the project leaders must remember that standards, plans, methodologies and software are not the primary goals, these are just the means. This study finds that the outcome of a project as success or failure completely depend on the soft skills exhibited by the people involved in the project.
The research is divided into two major parts, each having three chapters. The first part looks at the emotional intelligence in regard with oneself. At the beginning of the chapter, Dr. Wei Singer, the author, focuses on enhancing self-awareness that is essential in good interpersonal expertise and communication skills. The author presents some basic tips for making assessments, using senses, getting in touch with people’s feelings, and enhancing awareness of their actions and intentions. EI at Workplace is not considered in this study for persons trying to examine the theoretic basis of the aspects of intelligence, instead, it is a written, self-help book that is designed to enhance one's ability to achieve emotional stability in the workplace. The content of this book is rich in presenting examples of various conflicts that occur in demands of today’s corporate world. This book also talks about the persuasion and negotiation skills have an essence in measuring a manager’s convincing and influential abilities. In the daily life many a people lack this ability to effectively convey the message, interests or emotions clearly and effectively just because they don’t know that the influencing appropriate way of attaining attention and psychology, consideration and the high level of interest of listeners. Besides that people who are aware about knowledge of negotiation and persuasion; however, lacking experience in their personal dealing without proper use of convincing arguments in their life are also existing in this world. Such people become unable to acquire the interest of their listeners and get the attention they want.
This study is pertaining to the seven elements of emotional intelligence among which one is writing skills. Efficient Writing Skills are one of the core competencies that a good manager must acquire. Unfortunately most of people around us do not consider this skill so vital because debatably usually many readers are also not that much proficient in spelling and grammar so it goes unnoticed but one must consider it seriously while writing to senior manager and higher officials because they will surely notice this and will not accept it as an excuse. Writing skills directly personifies personality to other colleagues, boss and subordinates, the better a person communicates to them in written context the better the impression they will get of him, and he never knows the worth of this impression made. Because in this work overloaded world, nobody has enough time to waste on understating official letters, full of verbosity, and they don’t bother too to consider his brusque manner written letters which to be clarified and explained at every line.
This study talks about emotional intelligence and soft skills that are compared with technical and occupational skills. There is a large number of views presented in this study on the importance of people’s soft skills in relation to their trade specialties and core competencies; however, each of these may vary for each unique profession. Interpersonal skills and communication skills are another name for the soft skills. It also includes public dealing, influential skills, motivational skills, team building, conflict resolution skills, jolliness, creative writing skills, emotional dealing, soft spoken skills and self-supervisory skills etc.
This paper tells that the intuition is the capacity to trust others and be trusted by others. It is a sense of authenticity, integrity and the appreciation of a constructive discontent about the capability to find breakthrough answers to problems in difficult situations and make good decisions with a leadership effectiveness. Project leaders will be able to embrace while reaching out the power of people’s emotions instead of shying these away from them. This study also tells that awareness about adopting soft skills at the production level improves the level of morale of the employees since they feel valued by the management. A project leader should be well familiar with his flow charts and drawings and project plans but he also needs to be well familiar with the people involved in the project. The project leaders are the ones who are followed by the workforce of the project. The better interpersonal skills the leaders have, the better working environment the workforce will get. Good working environment is not possible until the top management in a project adopts soft skills. This study also tells about the importance of keeping the shop floor level workforce feel about getting attention and interest of the high level management. This not only boosts up the motivation but it also serves as a good evaluation tool while carrying out performance appraisal. This research also shows that the emotional intelligence is a prime ability of an effective manager in a project. Emotionally intelligent project leaders can read the emotions of the workforce and understand their emotional and social needs that give an added advantage to the leader to influence the workers in a better manner in order to achieve long term objectives. Technical expertise are of short term nature but to be successful in the long run, a manager in a project needs to apply soft skills. In the case of complex projects, soft skills become more significant as compared to relatively simple projects. Giving impulsive reactions and allowing other’s bad emotions to get over through soft conversation was never considered a wise way of dealing with workforce in the management sciences. Now a days, this is a technique that serves as a pre-requisite of effective and efficient managerial skills.
This article presents a recent research that examined impacts of project managers’ EI on observations of the inter-personal competence. The prime goal of this study was to evaluate whether EI valuation scores show noteworthy relationships with interpersonal competency assessments that project managers achieve. This study also shows that firms with high positive intent and motivation, prove to be having fun as a part, but are more advantageous, progressive and advanced, yielding multiple times than an ordinary company that struggles with motivation. A successful manager keeps the team progressive and self-motivated through providing intuitive supervision within their tasks while devising positive work policies. He also provides them workplace and job security with deserving and healthy wages. He regards the hardworking and competencies of the project workers and leads them as the role model to efficient and effective way of working.
This research finds that non-verbal skills have a great power of influencing. This study talks about the significance of maintaining eye contact while having conversations with coworkers, subordinates and of course the top management. The body language of a project manager can win the hearts of the audience if the person knows the way to timely and effectively utilize them as per required tasks. Most of the people achieve very good technical expertise about a field but they remain unable in convincing other people through logical arguments. This study presents a good way for the project leaders to effectively persuade their workforce while adopting soft skills at the workplace. This study also helps in building good EQ level through employing the soft skills in order to make the workplace environment a good place for the worker to work in.
Conclusion
The research studies that were studied for this literature review paper included research findings in the favor of soft skills; however, there is a gap present in the studies about the fact that none of these studies showed unfavorable outcomes of soft skills. Since everything has some positive and some negative points so there may be some negative outcomes of soft skills employed in the workplace especially in the project management field. Project management is a complex field that includes machines as well as humans. Humans have complex psychology whereas machines are relatively simple. This brings complexity to a new level in order to achieve the project’s goals. If the project leader simply takes up the project with applying soft skills all the time then the logical and standard way to doing machine job may get compromised. On the other hand, not applying any soft skill in a project means demotivation among the project members that reduces the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the project.
Soft skills were not considered as a wise tool by management in the past; however, the today’s management is considered incomplete without employing soft skills to improve productivity level of workers. Today’s managers as well as engineers in almost every type of project need to understand the emotional and social needs of their project team members and should try to fulfill those needs by applying soft skills. Interpersonal skills are a part of soft skills that are an essential tool in acquiring workers’ attention and making them feel safe, motivated and appraised for their work. The workforce of the day is also well aware of the soft skills applied by the top management so the project managers are required to handle the smart workers in an effective manner. Project leaders need to understand that their workforce comprise of humans with feelings unlike the machines that don’t possess any emotion.
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