INTRODUCTION
Globally, there is a rising need to develop public relations leaders by organizations and professions with keen interest in not only surviving contemporary competitions but also staying ahead (Berger & Meng, 2014). Many leadership related studies exist and averagely conclude that leadership is pivotal to an organization’s progress. These studies’ conclusions are justified by the fact that leadership can be attributed to quite a range of organizational processes. For instance, leaders are saddled with the responsibilities of promoting an organization’s mission, vision, and culture; allocating limited organizational resources; making strategic decisions; evaluating the performance of subordinates and influencing stakeholders interests, loyalty and perceptions to mention a few (Bush, 2013). Basically, making strategic decisions appears to be the leadership role necessary to make modern organization stay productive as the process involves leaders deciding on how to wield the limited organizational resources to yield maximum outputs (Chauhan, 2016).
In carrying out such sensitive responsibility, several authors have established that certain qualities are peculiar to leaders which includes visionary thinking (Bass, 2018), integrity and authenticity (Brown and Trevinos, 2018), Resilience and adaptability (Luthans, 2002), spreading positivity and promoting peace (Cameroon and Spreitzer, 2012), cultivating growth and individuality (Hirst et al, 2009), and Emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1998). Contrary to the popular belief that decision making by leaders are mostly inspired by rational thinking, study reveal that most human decisions are more influenced by intuition and emotional responses (Markic, 2009) which has caused a tilt from examining cognitive approaches in decision making to examining the contributions by emotions. This essay’s focus is on the last leadership quality, emotional intelligence among public relations leadership, a newly examined niche of leaders. Specifically, the essay seeks to investigate the approaches emotional intelligence influences PR decision making, team management and client relations in a high pressure environment.
UNDERSTANDING KEY CONCEPTS
A good starting point to investigating the roles that emotional intelligence (EI) plays in public relations leadership is by understanding the key concepts. Starting with the former, several definitions exist however modern scholars like Ayat (2021) simply defined Emotional Intelligence as a measure of an individual’s social ability to control his or her emotion in relations to other’s emotion in a society. Kiishi (2024), another modern scholar defined emotional intelligence as an individual’s ability to recognize, understand, and manage their own emotions as well as the emotions of others. From the classical scholars viewpoints, Salovey & Mayer (1990) defined emotional intelligence as the ability to process emotional information precisely and efficiently including those information that are important to recognize, construct and regulate emotions in oneself and others. Bar On (1997) defined the concept as an array of non cognitive capacities, competences and skills capable of influencing an individual’s chances of surviving environmental demands and pressures. Whether classical or modern, from the definitions, it is clear that emotional intelligence deals with emotions either intra-personally or inter-personally and how to use emotion to one’s advantage.
