The association between hospital chief executive officers' emotional intelligence and senior management emotional intelligence, stress, and satisfaction

The proposed research will examine the association between hospital CEO's emotional intelligence (EI) and their senior management's EI, stress, and satisfaction. Health care institutions are experiencing significant challenges in meeting their mandate of providing necessary access to patient care and quality care. Leaders are an essential driver of individual, team, and organizational performance. Emotions are an indispensable and essential aspect of an individual¿s personal and work life. However, for decades, the relationship between cognitive effects, measured by IQ and similar tests, and success, has been the focus of research and theory discussions, and emotions have been widely ignored. Furthermore, the impact of leadership on organizational outcomes in health care has also not been studied extensively. The question remains as to how a leader's EI effects their senior manager's EI, stress, and satisfaction. Minimal research has been conducted in this area not only in the business literature but also in health care. The scientific work in this area, to date, has proposed various theoretical constructs of EI competencies and their relationship to organizational performance. Yet there is a critical need to test these theories in the Canadian health care setting and determine their usefulness. This dissertation proposes to examine the relationship between health care executive's EI and the EI, stress and satisfaction of the senior management team. When we understand the relationship between CEO's EI and various senior management outcomes we will be able to build senior management teams that are able to meet the challenges they face in the Canadian health care industry.