Emotional Intelligence, Diversity, and Organizational Performance: Linkages and Theoretical Approaches for an Emerging Field

Twenty-first-century organizations are expanding its business across globe to cater varied needs of society and in this process different people join such organizations from various walks of life giving rise to a diverse workforce. It is presumed that organizations having varied people with creative and problem-solving skills will create competitive advantage for organizations. However, it is pertinent to mention here that these people belong to different locations and different cultures and may have differences in values, language, behaviors, preferences, and norms which may lead to friction/complications with other people. In spite of such differences, they are expected to work as a cohesive team to achieve desired performance of the organization. However, at the same time it is observed across industries that there are certain unknown impediments which lead toward disengagement at workplace, resulting into high employee turnover, and consequent poor performance of organization. Several scholarly studies in this context have been carried out to understand and minimize the complexity based on different inferences. Many positive psychologists apprehend that understanding and appreciating the emotions of other person will give the organizations a rational upshot in terms of managing diversity at workplace. Taking their cognizance we hypothesize that if organizations are able to hire the employees with good emotional intelligence (EI) skills, it would be helpful for smooth functioning of team or else the employed personnel should be trained properly in EI to accept challenges during work force diversity. Therefore, this conceptual review is going to critically examine the behavioral patterns of workforce, organizational interventions, and leadership challenges to address them in the context of diversity at workplace.