A leader’s call for emotional commitment is an appeal to gut feelings that compel people to act. Where intellectual commitment is about convincing people, winning emotional commitment is about moving them.
Daniel Goleman is a psychologist whose work is about emotional intelligence, which refers to one’s ability to know and manage one’s emotions, motivate oneself, recognize emotions in others, and handle relationships effectively. Goleman, along with Richard Boyatzis, a professor of organizational behavior, and Annie McKee, an educator and business consultant, explored the significance of Emotional Intelligence to leadership in their book Primal Leadership. The authors make their view of leadership very clear when they state,
Great leadership works through the emotions . . . even if they get everything else just right, if leaders fail in this primal task of driving emotions in the right direction, nothing they do will work as well as it could or should.
Goleman also points out that the evolutionary development of the human brain has furnished us with primitive and instinctive responses that may be inappropriate for a given situation in the modern world. He wrote, ‘‘For better or for worse, our appraisal of every personal encounter and our responses to it are shaped not just by our rational judgments or our personal history, but also by our distant ancestral past.’’
Civilization has developed with a rapidity that exceeds the development of our emotional competence, says Goleman. And because emotions are impulses to act, our actions may be driven by impulses, such as anger, fear, and frustration, that are appropriate only to a time in our distant past. Emotional Intelligence is about understanding this, and also about employing our capacity to exert intelligent management of our emotions and behavior.
According to Goleman and his coauthors, leaders are resonant when they are able to hit just the right emotional chord with their followers so that people feel uplifted and inspired. This resonance in turn amplifies and prolongs the leader’s message. Sometimes that chord begins with the leader’s hope and enthusiasm. But it might also begin when the leader empathizes by tuning into and expressing whatever emotions are present. Either way, says Goleman, ‘‘Emotionally intelligent leaders build resonance by tuning into people’s feelings—their own and other’s—and guiding them in the right direction.’’ A leader’s resonance with followers gives rise to emotional commitment.
Just as lower-order change can be accelerated by combining intellectual-commitment with political commitment, so too can change be accelerated by combining emotional commitment with political commitment. If a person is politically committed and has strong feelings about a needed change, that change will probably be pursued.