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Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a framework for conceptualizing the role of emotional and social skills in effective leadership and management and provides preliminary suggestions for research and for the development of leader emotional and social skills. Design/methodology/approach – The paper generalizes a dyadic communications framework in order to describe the process of emotional and social exchanges between leaders and their followers. Findings – The paper shows how emotional skills and complementary social skills are essential for effective leadership through a literature review and discussion of ongoing research and a research agenda. Practical implications – Suggestions for the measurement and development of emotional and social skills for leaders and managers are offered. Originality/value – The work provides a framework for emotional and social skills in order to illustrate their role in leadership and their relationship to emotional and social intelligences. It outlines a research agenda and advances thinking of the role of developable emotional and social skills for managers. In his classic work on managerial skills, Mintzberg (1973) listed specific interpersonal skills (i.e. the ability to establish and maintain social networks; the ability to deal with subordinates; the ability to empathize with top-level leaders) as critical for managerial effectiveness. Even earlier than 1973, researchers examined the role of broad interpersonal skills, such as empathy, social skills, and tact, in predicting leadership emergence and effectiveness (see Bass, 1990 for a review). Managers, executives, and human resources professionals clearly understand the importance of strong interpersonal skills. A common theoretical framework linking emotional and social skills with leadership effectiveness is necessary to guide research and the assessment and training and development of organizational leaders. This paper takes a framework for understanding the emotional and social skills that underlie any form of interpersonal communication, and applies it specifically to leader and managerial processes and outcomes. We make comparisons between this emotional/social skill approach and the emerging constructs of emotional and social intelligences – two other constructs that were developed in the sphere of interpersonal communication and later applied to management. Further, in a series of research propositions we discuss how specific types of skills should play an important part in The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
The authors address the decades-old mystery of the association between individual differences in the expression and perception of nonverbal cues of affect. Prior theories predicted positive, negative, and zero correlations in performance-given empirical results ranging from r = -.80 to r = +.64. A meta-analysis of 40 effects showed a positive correlation for nonverbal behaviors elicited as intentional communication displays but zero for spontaneous, naturalistic, or a combination of display types. There was greater variation in the results of studies having round robin designs and analyzed with statistics that do not account for the interdependence of data. The authors discuss implications for theorists to distinguish emotional skills in terms of what people are capable of doing versus what people actually do.
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Human Communication Research
