The influence of emotional intelligence on job performance: Moderating effects of leadership

Theory suggests that individuals who are higher in emotional intelligence are likely to exhibit a higher level of performance. This paper studies the influence of emotional intelligence on job performance, task performance and contextual performance, and explores the moderating effects of leadership. The research results show that the emotional intelligence has a significant positive correlation with job performance, task performance and contextual performance respectively, and emotional intelligence has stronger effects on contextual performance than task performance. In addition, transactional leadership has no moderating effect on emotional intelligence-job performance relationship, and transformational leadership only moderates the relationship between emotional intelligence and contextual performance. Specifically, the relationship is stronger when the level of transformational leadership is low, which partly supports our hypothesis.