The Impact of emotional intelligence in project management to improve team performance

Abstract

As both technical world and business world is rapidly changing all organizations in software industry are trying to use different approaches to maximize output of their projects. Improving team performance is one of the ways to achieve higher success rate of software projects. Emotion Intelligence (EI) is a significant predictor for team performance. Therefore, software organizations should keep their focus on EI level of the employees. This research examines the relationships among EI factors and Team performance. As a methodology for this study, online and offline survey has been conducted. A well-structured questionnaire has been distributed among 310 software professionals. The population for this research is all project managers, Team leaders, software engineers, QA engineers and business analysis in software industry in Sri Lanka which count as 37284 as per the National ICT workforce survey carried out by ICTA of Sri Lanka on 2013. The four main factors which are self-awareness, selfmanagement, social-awareness and relationship management were selected as individual variables for the study. This research found a significant positive correlation between all four variables among team performance. This research brings out a valuable result which is EI of employees is directly impact on team performance in software industry in Sri Lanka. Further this study suggests set of guidelines to follow in order to improve the EI skills of employee which deliver a better team performance