Emotional intelligence in organizational development: A q methodological study on what employees in learning organizations think of their emotional intelligence

Abstract

The main purpose for this thesis was to look at organizations in development. The motivation for this is that there is an increasing amount of organizations that are focusing on developing their employees. The theory sets out to see what these employees think of their emotional intelligence, where the research question was: How do employees experience their own emotional intelligence in an environment of change?

The research method applied was q method, which looks for its participant’s subjective opinion. 18 participants partook in the study, where they sorted among 36 statements and placed them in a matrix by if they found them to be like themselves or unlike themselves. A two factor solution was selected, where 16 sorts were distributed to the two factors, 11 and 5 in each respectively. The analysis showed that there was a general focus on development for both factors, where there were some differences in how they pursued development and who it included. In the discussion it was proclaimed that factor 1 worked to achieve learning, and included others in having a positive view upon challenges and development. Factor 2 focused on awareness of others and own emotions, and favored development induced by self. Towards the end of the discussion there was an indication that the factors’ different views upon development could be explained by that they were in different points of developing their emotional intelligence. The organizational impact on this was further assumed to be at least present, even though a direct causation is difficult to find.