Tactics of handling interpersonal conflict through emotional intelligence

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the relationship of team leader's emotional intelligence (EI) with indirect intervention of five conflict-handling styles on interpersonal conflict. Totally, 213 out of 300 team leaders completed a paper-based questionnaire with 71% return rate. SPSS 23 and PROCESS MACRO to test mediation, 5,000 times bootstrapping with cross-sectional research design was used. Results show that EI is negatively and significantly associated with interpersonal conflict. High EI team leaders are better able to address interpersonal conflict. Furthermore, integrating style mediated relationship between EI and interpersonal conflict. This study provides a broad insight for leader's EI abilities and conflict management techniques. It contributes to the literature by identifying significance of EI for team leader and its effects on interpersonal conflict through five handling styles in a non-western context. This study enhances understanding of conflict situations and appropriate style selection to cater interpersonal conflict in telecom industry of Pakistan.