NURS 623 Week 5 Emotional Intelligence Paper Example

Emotional Intelligence Paper: Why the Nurse Leader's Feelings Are a Patient Safety Issue, and How Organizations Can Grow Emotionally Intelligent Leaders

Introduction

A charge nurse snaps at a new graduate who asks a question during a busy admission. The graduate does not ask the next question, about a medication dose that seemed high, and the dose is given. Nothing about this scene involves a lack of clinical knowledge. It involves a leader's emotions under pressure and their effect on a team member's willingness to speak. Emotional intelligence is the term for the abilities that determine how leaders handle such moments. Roussel (2018) describes effective nursing leadership as depending on relationships as much as on technical expertise, and emotional intelligence is the capacity that makes those relationships work. This paper argues that emotional intelligence in nurse leaders is a mechanism of safe care rather than a soft extra, reviews current evidence on how it operates, examines how organizations shape it, and offers recommendations for nurse administrators.

Defining Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is commonly described in four domains. Self-awareness means noticing what one is feeling and how that feeling is shaping one's behavior. Self-management means keeping those feelings in check and still acting well when pressure rises. Social awareness is the ability to perceive the emotions and needs of others, including empathy. Relationship management is the ability to use these capacities to communicate, resolve conflict and build teams. Heyes (2026) describes self-awareness as the foundation of the others, noting that it underpins a leader's ability to perceive and manage emotions and to respond appropriately to others, and that it can be developed through reflection, although it is understood and expressed differently across individuals and cultures.

Measuring Emotional Intelligence, and What Measures Cannot Show

Researchers measure emotional intelligence in two broad ways. Ability measures ask people to solve emotional problems, such as identifying the feeling in a face or choosing the best response to a scenario, and score their answers against expert or consensus judgments. Trait measures ask people to rate themselves on statements about their emotional habits. The large nursing survey discussed below used a trait questionnaire, which is practical for studying more than a thousand managers but carries a known weakness: people who see themselves as emotionally skilled may also describe their own leadership favorably, which can inflate associations between the two. For nurse administrators, the practical lesson is that a self-rating of emotional intelligence should not be used alone to select or evaluate leaders. Observed behavior, feedback from staff and peers, and performance in realistic scenarios offer a fuller picture than a questionnaire.

Argument 1: Emotional Intelligence Is Linked to More Effective Leadership

The strongest recent evidence on emotional intelligence and leadership style in nursing comes from a large survey. Ntotsi et al. (2026) studied 1,243 nurse managers in public health care facilities, measuring trait emotional intelligence and leadership style. Emotional intelligence was positively associated with transformational and transactional leadership and negatively associated with passive leadership. It also partly mediated the relationship between professional experience and leadership, with effects that varied by hierarchical level. Because the study was cross-sectional, it cannot show that emotional intelligence causes better leadership, but its size and consistency make the association hard to dismiss.

For administrators, the finding about passive leadership matters most. Passive leaders avoid decisions and intervene only when problems become serious, which leaves staff without direction or support. If emotional intelligence is associated with less passive leadership, then developing it may reduce the kind of leadership that lets problems grow unaddressed.

Argument 2: Emotional Intelligence Works as a Process That Connects Leaders to Safe Care

Qualitative research shows how emotional intelligence operates in daily leadership. Biyik and Türe (2026) interviewed 20 first-level nurse managers in a training and research hospital and analyzed their accounts through the four domains. Self-awareness supported reflective practice. Self-management allowed managers to regulate their emotions in high-risk situations. Social awareness helped them recognize team-related risks early and supported patient-centered care through empathy. Relationship management strengthened communication, teamwork and continuity of care within psychologically safe environments. The authors concluded that emotional intelligence functions as an integrated system linking a leader's individual competencies to team functioning and safe care delivery. In the opening example, the charge nurse's lapse in self-management became a team's lapse in communication, and the team's lapse became a risk to the patient.

Argument 3: Organizations Shape Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is often treated as a personal trait, but recent evidence suggests that organizations shape how it develops and whether it can be used. In the same survey of nurse managers, Ntotsi et al. (2026) found that hierarchical position moderated the relationships between experience and emotional intelligence and between emotional intelligence and transformational leadership, that transformational and transactional leadership appeared more often among managers higher in the hierarchy while passive leadership was more common among front-line managers, and that managers in larger facilities reported higher emotional intelligence and less passive leadership. They concluded that emotionally intelligent leadership is structurally enabled or constrained, and they called for organizational supports such as supervisory time, mentorship and conditions that sustain emotional resources.

This finding has a direct implication for nurse administrators. Front-line managers, who have the most contact with staff, may also have the least organizational support for emotionally intelligent leadership. An administrator who expects front-line managers to be calm, empathetic and present while giving them wide spans of control and no time for reflection is expecting the impossible.

Preparing Charge Nurses, the First Leaders Staff Meet

Many nurse leaders begin as charge nurses promoted from the staff they now direct, and the opening scene shows why emotional intelligence matters most at this level. Oscar and Best (2026) note that charge nurses often step into the role with no formal leadership preparation. Their academic hospital responded with a six-month development program built on the AONL nurse leader competencies, combining self-assessment, case-based learning, practice with realistic scenarios, mentorship and tools specific to the role. Emotional intelligence was part of the core content, along with conflict and change management. Participants reported greater confidence and better communication and conflict resolution. These are self-reported gains, not measured outcomes, but the program shows what an organization can do for the leaders closest to patients. A charge nurse who has rehearsed a tense exchange with a new graduate in a scenario is better placed to answer a question calmly during a busy admission.

Emotional Intelligence and Moral Distress

Nursing leaders also influence how staff cope with moral distress, the distress that arises when nurses believe they cannot act on their ethical judgment. A qualitative systematic review of nurses' perceptions found that the way leaders behaved affected how safe nurses felt to speak, how they reached ethical decisions and how well they recovered, and that inadequate leadership support amplified moral distress (Bolton et al., 2026). Although the review included only two studies, it suggests that emotionally intelligent leaders, who notice distress and respond to it, may protect staff from burnout. Social awareness and relationship management are again the relevant capacities.

Emotional Intelligence in Three Leadership Situations

The research becomes concrete in the situations nurse leaders face every week. Consider three.

In the first, two experienced nurses on a cardiac unit have stopped speaking to each other after a dispute over assignments, and newer nurses are taking sides. A manager low in social awareness may notice only when the conflict produces a formal complaint. A manager high in it notices the silence at the nurses' station, the changed lunch groups and the reluctance to ask either nurse for help, and meets with both nurses early. Relationship management then shapes the conversation: the manager separates the dispute about assignments, which can be fixed with a clearer rotation, from the damaged working relationship, which needs a facilitated discussion.

In the second, a director must tell a unit that its budgeted positions will be cut by two full-time equivalents. Self-management allows the director to deliver the news without defensiveness, and social awareness allows the director to anticipate the fear behind staff questions, which is usually about safety and workload rather than about money. A director who acknowledges that fear and explains how assignments will be protected keeps more trust than one who recites the budget.

In the third, a family member angrily accuses a nurse of ignoring a call light. The charge nurse who arrives first must manage personal reactions, calm the family member, support the nurse and find out what happened, all in a few minutes. Here the four domains operate together, which is what the qualitative research describes.

In each situation the clinical facts are simple; what decides the outcome is how the leader handles emotion, both their own and everyone else's.

Recommendations for Nurse Administrators

The evidence leads to five recommendations. First, include emotional intelligence in the selection of nurse leaders, using behavioral interview questions about how candidates have handled conflict, stress and others' distress. Second, provide structured development, such as reflective practice groups, coaching and 360-degree feedback, for new and existing managers. Third, protect time for reflection and supervision, which the large survey identified as an organizational support for emotionally intelligent leadership. Fourth, give front-line managers spans of control and administrative support that make emotionally intelligent leadership possible. Fifth, prepare charge nurses before or soon after they take the role, with mentors, scenario practice and clear role expectations.

A Faith Perspective

Scripture describes self-control as part of the fruit of the Spirit (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Galatians 5:22-23), and Proverbs holds that "whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city" (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 16:32). Both passages describe, in spiritual language, much of what researchers now call emotional intelligence. For Christian nurse leaders, developing emotional intelligence is part of growing in character, and creating organizations that support it is part of caring for the people they lead.

Conclusion

Emotional intelligence in nurse leaders shapes leadership style, team functioning and safe care. Recent evidence shows it is associated with more effective and less passive leadership, operates as a process linking leaders' inner lives to team safety, and is enabled or constrained by organizational structures. Its measurement is imperfect and much of the evidence is cross-sectional, yet the pattern across studies is consistent enough to act on. Nurse administrators who select for it, develop it and build organizations that support it are not attending to a soft skill; they are strengthening one of the foundations of safe care.

References

Biyik, M., & Türe, A. (2026). Exploring nurse managers' emotional intelligence: A qualitative study using the Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Competence Model. Research and Theory for Nursing Practice. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1891/RTNP-2025-0199

Bolton, S., Baldwin, A., Adams, A. M. N., Willis, E., Cutmore, E., Johnston, S., Snaith, N., & Dafny, H. A. (2026). The moral of the story: Perception of leadership with moral distress in registered nurses: A qualitative systematic review. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 35(10), 4106-4123. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.70354

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Heyes, S. L. (2026). Self-awareness in nurse leadership and its relationship with emotional intelligence and reflective practice. Nursing Standard. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.7748/ns.2026.e12773

Ntotsi, P., Gouva, M., Lavdaniti, M., & Minasidou, E. (2026). Emotional intelligence and leadership in nursing management: The role of hierarchical context in shaping leadership behaviour. Journal of Advanced Nursing. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.70680

Oscar, N., & Best, R. (2026). Leadership at the point of care: Developing charge nurses for complex healthcare environments. Nursing Administration Quarterly, 50(3), 147-151. https://doi.org/10.1097/NAQ.0000000000000760

Roussel, L. (2018). Management and leadership for nurse administrators (8th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.