I. INTRODUCCIÓN
I.4. A NTECEDENTES BIBLIOGRÁFICOS
I.4.3. Publicaciones de la segunda mitad del siglo XX (hasta 1980)
In human activities, for instance in leadership, some people seem to have something or they seem to do something or know something that makes their acts special. Continuously they perform their work well. Polanyi (1966) wrote about skills or knowledge that people have but that they are not conscious of and called the phenomenon tacit knowledge. Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995), for their part, underlined the importance of tacit knowledge in creating knowledge in organizations. In the 1990s Goleman (1995, 1998) as well as Mayer and Salovey
(Salovey & Mayer 1990, Mayer & Salovey 1997) were interested in people who managed to communicate with other people extremely well. They called this invention emotional intelligence.
Putting an emphasis on tacit knowledge and EI among the characteristics of good leadership changes the study of the thesis from the factual and predefined research to research where the skills to understand, create and to lead relationship and communication between a leader and an employee are in a more essential position than the factual knowledge. According to the research results of the thesis, tacit knowledge and EI seem to have a strong effect on the leaders’ good activities. Tacit knowledge and EI consist of information and knowledge which are invisible but can be apparent if they are identified. In general, it can be interpreted that tacit knowledge and EI affect leaders’ behavior constantly but are not taken into consideration when, for example, IS are designed and implemented for human activities in the organizations.
Next tacit knowledge and EI are described with and reflected on leadership. The following presentations can also be viewed so that if an IS for leadership is designed, how tacit knowledge and EI could be taken into consideration and utilize as a mine of human and sensitive information.
Tacit knowledge
Polanyi (1966) highlighted the well-known expression, which he regards as a starting point of his studies of tacit knowledge: “We can know more than we can
tell” (Polanyi 1966: 4). Rather than immediately defining the concept of tacit
knowledge with straight formulated sentences, Polanyi (1966) explained it and simultaneously defined it with conceptions of four aspects of tacit knowing, which are described in table 6.
Table 6. The four aspects of tacit knowing.
Aspect of tacit knowing Description
Functional structure “We know the first term only by relying on our awareness of it for attending
to the second. … We are attending from these elementary movements to the achievement of their joint purpose and hence are usually unable to specify these elementary acts.” (Polanyi 1966: 10).
Phenomenal aspect “We may say, in general, that we are aware of the proximal term of an act
of tacit knowing in the appearance of its distal term; we are aware of that from which we are attending to another thing, in the appearance of that thing.” (Polanyi 1966: 11).
Semantic aspect “We are attending to the meaning of its (tool) impact on our hands in terms
of its effect on the things to which we are applying it.” (Polanyi 1966: 13).
Ontological aspect “Since tacit knowing establishes a meaningful relation between two terms,
we may identify it with the understanding of the comprehensive entity which these two terms jointly constitute. Thus the proximal term represents the particulars of this entity, and we can say, accordingly, that we comprehend the entity by relying on our awareness of its particulars for attending to their joint meaning.” (Polanyi 1966: 13).
Later, tacit knowledge has been defined as knowledge which is personal and context-specific and which people carry in their mind and is, therefore, difficult to access, formalize and communicate (Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995: 59). Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995) introduced a theory of organizational knowledge creation by using the concept of tacit knowing. They described knowledge creation with four modes (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization (Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995: 62–70)), with five conditions of spiral model of knowledge (intention, autonomy, fluctuation and creative chaos, redundancy and requisite variety (Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995: 74–83)) and with five-phase model of the organizational knowledge-creating process (sharing tacit knowledge, creating concepts, justifying concepts, building an archetype and cross-levelling the knowledge (Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995: 85–89)). Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995) presented a sensible explanation of tacit knowledge which is easy to confirm and apply in an organizational context. After their work many papers have been published on tacit knowledge in organizations.
Researchers of KM in IS science may have responded to the research of tacit knowledge most strongly (Stenmark 2001). Stenmark (2001) writes that tacit knowledge is simultaneously ambiguous and elusive which results from three reasons at least:
– people are not fully aware of their tacit knowledge
– people do not have a need to make tacit knowledge explicit on an individual
level
– people may lose power or competitive advantage making tacit knowledge
explicit. (Stenmark 2001: 11–12.)
Stenmark (2001) presumes, based on his empirical findings of leadership, that in practice demonstrated and explained tacit knowledge with empirical evidence is much more trustworthy than theory-based explicit knowledge. He challenges future knowledge management systems (KMS) to be more open also for unstructured tacit knowledge.
On an individual level tacit knowledge is something that people are not aware of. They can become aware of it in a specific context where some thing raises the another thing into the awareness. The context can be concrete or it can be memorized. Tacit knowledge as a phenomenon in an interactive or cooperative situation is a sentimental occasion. Emotions are important elements when people are communicating with each other. (Polanyi 1966.) Polanyi (1966: 12–13) spoke about feelings in a very concrete way, such as feeling a tool in one’s hand and what it indicates. Emotions as abstract parts of the situation are essential when highlighting tacit knowing. Here the important question is how tacit knowing – becoming aware of past experiences and of how they feel – may help, support, limit or prevent communication. Generally speaking, how tacit knowing influences people’s behavior, beliefs, values and attitudes when they are communicating.
In this thesis tacit knowledge is used to characterize the activities of good leadership. In leadership research several studies of tacit knowledge exist. For example, the study by Hedlund, Forsythe, Horvath, Williams, Snooke & Sternberg (2003) is linked to the concepts of leadership and tacit knowledge. Their quantitative research is introduced as an example of the shared study of leadership and tacit knowledge. Here tacit knowledge has been regarded as a way to solve problems. In this sense, Hedlund et al. (2003) published their results of studying why some leaders are more successful than others in the military context. They developed three-level framework which they named Tacit Knowledge for Military Leaders (TKML) to assess the amount of knowledge leaders possess. A total of 562 leaders at platoon, company and battalion levels participated in the study. The research and the results were highly interesting. From the viewpoint of the research of the thesis it was significant to notice that
the inventories of TKML “can be used to help leaders indentify areas in which
they may need further development and can stimulate their thinking about important leadership issues (e.g., how to manage one’s anger in front of subordinates). Alternatively, the inventories can be used to help leaders develop the skills to learn more effectively from their experiences.” (Hedlund et al. 2003:
136). The interviewees of the thesis also underlined how meaningful it was to learn to know one’s own behavior in leadership and to be able to develop their work using that knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is hard to codify and to articulate explicit knowledge. Busch & Richards (2001) introduce how tacit knowledge could be codified as an IS. They present an approach which aims to graphically represent articulable tacit knowledge. They divide the approach into two fundamentally different approaches to provide a visual perspective as to what tacit knowledge constitutes. The approaches are:
1. “an initial approach using formal concept analysis as a means of visualizing tacit knowledge differences in questionnaire respondent” 2. a qualitative approach which “aims better to define both textually and
then graphically what we may actually consider to comprise tacit knowledge” (Busch & Richrads 2001: 51).
In the first approach Busch & Richards (2001) made a questionnaire and asked 14 participants to answer it and analyzed the data quantitatively using formal concept analysis. In the second approach they used grounded theory as a research method, ‘network maps’ to connect the codes found in empirical data and ATLAS.itTM to
analyze data. Network maps resemble technically the mind maps made in the thesis. Busch & Richards (2001) are cautious with highlighting their research result but still they state that they took significant steps providing a visual alternative to textual level. Their approach was “to model not only how tacit
knowledge may be illustrated comparatively from one individual to the next, but also how we may graphically define what the ingredients of tacit knowledge constitute” (Busch &Richards 2001: 60). This article encourages creating a
system of tacit knowledge to support the work of leadership.
Emotional intelligence
The book ‘Emotional intelligence’, written by Goleman (1995), brought the concept of EI public awareness which is still a topic of interest in organizations.
Definitions of EI have constantly been changing but, in general, they underline people’s skills, abilities and capacities to perceive, assess, and manage one’s own, others’ and the group’s emotions.
Goleman (Goleman 1995, 1998, 2000, Goleman, Boyatzis & Mckee 2002) created an EI framework of five domains (see table 7), which he later simplified into four domains, where two of them, self-awareness and self-management, are linked to personal competence and the other two, social awareness and relationship management, are linked with social competence (Goleman et al. 2002: 39). Personal competencies determine how people manage themselves and social competencies determine how people control relationships (Goleman et al. 2002: 39). Self-awareness is the basis for confronting others. If a person does not recognize one’s own emotions, s/he cannot manage them or understand others’ emotions. Self-aware persons perceive inner signals and how emotions affect signals and job performance. They are empathic, they sense how others see a situation or they become sensitive how others feel. Empathy in social awareness enables an appropriate behavior such as calming fears, assuaging anger or joining in good spirit. Empathy is listening to and taking into consideration other people’s perspectives, creating channels between people and fine-tuning messages according to other people’s emotional states. Awareness of one’s own direction and priorities – self-awareness – makes it possible to understand one’s own values and visions, which, for their part, catalyze resonance from other people. (Goleman et al. 2002: 30–31.)
Table 7. Four domains of EI (Goleman 2000: 80, Goleman et al. 2002: 39).
PERSONAL COMPETENCE Description of Competence
Self-Awareness Emotional self-awareness: ability to read and understand one’s own
emotions and to recognize their impact on work performance, relationships, and the like
Accurate self-assessment: a realistic evaluation of one’s strengths
and limitations
Self-confidence: a strong and positive sense of one’s self-worth and
capabilities
Self-Management Emotional self-control: ability to keep disruptive emotions and
impulses under control
Transparency: consistent display of honesty and integrity:
trustworthiness
Adaptability: flexibility in adapting to changing situations or
overcoming obstacles
Achievement: a drive to improve performance to meet inner
standards of excellence
Initiative: readiness to act and seize opportunities Optimism: seeing the upside in events
SOCIAL COMPETENCE
Social Awareness Empathy: skill at sensing other people’s emotions, understanding
their perspective and taking an active interest in their concerns
Organizational awareness: ability to read the currents, decision
networks, and politics at the organizational life
Service: ability to recognize and meet follower, client, or customer
needs
Relationship Management Inspirational leadership: ability to guide and motivate with a
compelling vision
Influence: ability to wield a range of tactics for persuasion Developing others: propensity to bolster others’ abilities through
feedback
Change catalyst: initiating, managing, and leading in a new direction Conflict management: ability to resolve disagreements
Building bonds: proficiency at cultivating and maintaining a web of
relationships
Teamwork and collaboration: competence at promoting cooperation
and building teams
The history of EI begins in the 1960s when the term was used for the first time by the researchers Van Ghent (1961) and Leuner (1966). In 1986 Payne highlighted it again in his dissertation, and in the 1990s Salovey and Mayer (Salovey &
Mayer 1990, Mayer & Salovey 1997) wrote two articles about EI, where they explicitly defined EI and started to develop a theory and measure (Mayer, Salovey & Caruso 2004, Mayer, Roberts & Barsade 2008). They have depicted EI as “a
form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action” (Salovey & Mayer 1990: 189).
By studying EI, Salovey & Mayer (1990) were also excited about the conceptions of social intelligence and they regarded the conceptions as useful. The conceptions were: unifying construct for understanding personality by Cantor & Kihlström (1985, 1987) and constructive thinking as a core component of personality by Epstein & Meier (1989) (Salovey & Mayer 1990: 188–189).
Fig. 4. A four-branch model of the skills involved in EI (Mayer & Salovey 1997: 11).
In 1997 Mayer and Salovey developed a four-branch model for the skills of EI, which still today offers the basis of EI (Mayer & Salovey 1997, Mayer et al. 2008). The model is introduced in figure 4. The model has its base on Mayer & Salovey’s (1997) argument that EI describes actual abilities rather than preferred courses of behavior. The lowest level skills involves an ability to identify emotions in one’s own and other people’s physical states and an ability to express emotions and discriminate between accurate and inaccurate expressions of emotions. (Mayer & Salovey 1997.) The next level up means “assimilating basic
emotional experiences into mental life, weighting emotions against one another and against other sensations and thoughts, and allowing emotions to direct attention” (Mayer, Caruso & Salovey 2000a: 270). The third level includes
understanding and reasoning of emotions: ability to label emotions and recognize relations, to interpret meanings, to understand complex feelings and to recognize likely transitions among emotions. The highest level promotes emotional and
Reflective Regulation of Emotions to Promote Emotional and Intellectual Growth Understanding and Analyzing Emotions; Employing Emotional Knowledge Emotional Facilitation of Thinking Perception, Appraisal and Expression of Emotion
Emotional Intelligence
intellectual growth: ability to stay open to emotions, to reflectively engage or detach emotions, to reflectively monitor emotions and to manage emotions. (Mayer & Salovey 1997, Mayer et al. 2000a, Mayer et al. 2004.) In addition, Mayer & Salovey (1997) argued that before discussing EI, the concepts of intelligence and emotions should be first explored. For them “intelligence
pertains to abilities such as power to combine and separate concepts, to judge and to reason, and to engage in abstract thoughts” (Mayer & Salovey 1997: 4).
Emotions “include emotions themselves, moods, evaluations, and other feeling
states, including fatigue and energy” (Mayer & Salovey 1997: 4). They
emphasized, however, that not everything that connects cognition to emotions is EI. The description of EI they preferred combined the ideas that “emotion makes
thinking more intelligent and that one thinks intelligently about emotions” (Mayer
& Salovey 1997: 5).
Fig. 5. “The Scope of Emotional Intelligence” (Mayer et al. 2008: C-1). Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is an ability to understand and to problem-solve that involves:
• managing emotional responses • understanding emotions and emotional meanings
• appraising emotions from situations • using emotion for reasoning • identifying emotions in faces, voices, postures, and other content
Emotion
Emotions are coordinated responses to changes in the environment that involves: • invoking specific subjective experiences • activating relevant cognitions, especially related to taking action in relation to the self and environment
• coordinating bodily states so as to prepare for certain reactions (e.g., fight or flight)
• appraising the ongoing situation for changes
Intelligence
Intelligences are abilities to understand and problem-solve about information that involve:
• reasoning about abstract relationship (fluid intelligence)
• strong material in an organized fashion in memory (crystallized intelligence) • learning targeted material
• inputting material through sensory and perceptual channels
Mayer et al. (2008) have explored EI, emotions and intelligence further. In figure 5 the scope of EI is presented. The upper box labelled ‘emotional intelligence’ consists of abilities which EI is composed of. In Integrative-Model approaches all the specific abilities of EI are studied together. The bullet items in the upper box indicate Specific-Ability approaches to EI, which study matters such as “how well
a person identifies emotions in faces or how well a person understands emotional meanings” (Mayer et al. 2008: C-1). Mayer et al. (2008) argues that EI is closely
related to emotions (the box on the left) and intelligences (the box on the right). There also exist Mixed-Models approaches of EI, which consist of non-EI qualities and do not completely fill the framework of EI. They begin with qualities related to EI but “mix in with them:
– motives such as need for achievement
– social styles such as gregariousness and assertiveness – self-related qualities such as self-esteem
– control-related qualities such as flexibility and impulse control” (Mayer
et al. 2008: C-1).
Mayer & Salovey (1997) have defined and revised their definitions of EI as a result of their researches. The following definitions exist.
“Emotional intelligence involves the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth.” (Mayer & Salovey 1997: 10).
“Emotional intelligence is the set of abilities that account for how people’s emotional perception and understanding vary in their accuracy. More formally, emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive and express emotions in thought, understand and reason with emotion, and regulate emotion in the self and others.” (Mayer, Salovey & Caruso 2000b: 401). “Emotional intelligence concerns the ability to carry out accurate reasoning about emotions and the ability to use emotions and emotional knowledge to enhance thought.” (Mayer et al. 2008: 511).
Mayer et al. (2004) developed and introduced a quantitative method to measure EI in emotion-laden problem solving situations. They named it Mayer-Salovey- Caruso Emotional Intelligent Test (MSCEIT). The test measures four core
emotional competencies: perceiving emotions, using emotions to facilitate thinking, understanding emotions, and managing emotions (Mayer et al. 2004, Lopes, Brackett, Nezlek, Schütz, Sellin & Salovey 2004, Salovey & Grewal 2005, Brackett, Rivers, Shiffman, Lerner & Salovey 2006). When examining the results of the MSCEIT in organizations, Mayer et al. (2004) found some complexity concerning leadership and organizational behavior. On the one hand, EI skills may be an obstacle to career development in organizations where they are not noted or considered necessary. On the other hand, in organizations where EI is appreciated, positive relations between aspects of the subordinates’ commitment to the organization and the superiors’ EI have been found. (Mayer et al. 2004.)
In the new millennium, the number of articles in EI and leadership has increased. For example, George (2000) wrote about the role of EI in leadership. She emphasized that feelings, moods and emotions play a central role in leadership process. In The Leadership Quarterly several articles have been published on EI and leadership. For instance, Wong & Law (2002) argued that EI