University of Twente Student Theses
Improving Conflict Management and Team Effectiveness through Emotional Intelligence: An Exploratory study in Agile Teams
Saghir, Nassim (2022) Improving Conflict Management and Team Effectiveness through Emotional Intelligence: An Exploratory study in Agile Teams.
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| Abstract: | The fast change of products and services forces organizations to increase their flexibility, contributing to the emergence of agile teams, where Emotional Intelligence (EI) can be an essential element in making team members have better conflict resolution skills. Conflicts also relate to team meeting effectiveness (ME), where the latter is negatively influenced by the former, while EI can actually increase team effectiveness. Our mixed-method study sheds light on agile team dynamics, by exploring the influence of EI, conflict management, and team effectiveness in an agile context, while using innovative video observations based on verbal behaviors, encoded according to the new OBCC codebook. Although observed EI did not appear to be commonly displayed during task or relationship conflicts, it did shorten conflict duration in teams whose members showed frequent EI behaviours. Hence, it seems that EI leads to better conflict management, and a better handling of negative verbal behaviour. Further results show that observed and perceived EI are not correlated, underlying the discrepancy issues in EI measurements and the need to find alternatives. Subsequently, observed EI and observed conflict are positively correlated but not significant, taking into account the fact that we had a limited sample size. T-tests to examine whether high effective teams show overall more EI behaviours and less observed conflict than low effective teams were not significant either. In addition to testing our hypotheses, we performed a deductive analysis that revealed that the frequency of observed EI in team members varied widely across the sub-dimensions (SEA, OEA, UOE, and MOE), with this being the most salient peculiarity. We also found that most verbal behaviours can fit into each of these four subdimensions, which means that there is more to the verbal behaviours to be considered when investigating observed EI. The findings provide breeding grounds for future investigations that could be more indepth in nature, while underlining the importance of EI in training team members to deal better with negative feedback and conflict. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 85 business administration, organizational science |
| Programme: | Business Administration MSc (60644) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/93127 |
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