Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, and Organizational Resilience in NGOs

• In Event: Organizational resilience

Abstract

In this study, we explore the leadership characteristics of the civil sector in Hungary, and conduct its empirical investigation from an organizational and social-psychological approach. We propose that the leaders of NGOs, which we grouped according to their profile, can be distinguished from one another in terms of organizational culture perception, emotional intelligence pattern, resilience, and leadership style.
Civil organizations are important units of social, political and economic life. Their rising prominence has brought with it heightened scholarly interest in NGO leadership as potentially different from the leadership of profit-oriented organizations (Lewis 2001, Edwards and Fowler 2002; Hermann and Pagé 2016). A number of studies acknowledge the unique ethos, functions, and vulnerabilities of NGOs; therefore, the role of leadership for capacity development, community mobilization, sustainable development, change management, and organizational growth and fitness is particularly salient in the civil sector (Hailey 2000; Hailey and James 2004). Much of NGO leadership centers around relationships and their government (Kramer 2002, Unas 2016). Subsequently, the role of emotional intelligence for NGO leadership and organizational resilience is gaining attention. EI development (of leaders and employees alike) at the workplace has the ability to mediate conflicts, increase motivation, reduce stress, prevent burnout, and therefore create greater job satisfaction (Sherwani 2023, Larik et al. 2022, Malik et al. 2022). Studies that establish the impact of emotional intelligence on NGO leadership may contribute to the efforts to combat the “leadership deficit” (Apostu 2013) that threatens the civil sector, which is already thwarted by financial, social, and political precarities.
Our study addresses the relationship between leadership, emotional intelligence, and organizational resilience. Our results show that the leaders of NGOs (N=61), grouped according to their profile, can be distinguished from one another based on the perception of organizational culture, and on individual characteristics. In terms of leadership style, managers use a similar set of tools regardless of NGO profile. People in leadership positions show high emotional intelligence and resilience. In the organizations they lead, they prefer a supportive culture, while leadership is characterized by flexibility, cooperation and willingness to serve. Regarding the evaluation of the study, it should be emphasized that we are not aware of any work that would have examined the characteristics of civil society leadership in Hungary along the lines of the criteria we used. It should be added that the size of the entire sample requires the examination of a larger population than the sample involved in this study. Due to the size of the sample, the results we report are primarily guidelines. Our results offer the opportunity to formulate further hypotheses, and draw attention to the need to study NGO leadership from an organizational and social-psychological perspective for a more resilient civil sector.

Key words: NGO, leadership, emotional intelligence, resilience, organizational culture

References

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Authors

• László Balázs, University of Dunaujvaros

• Monika Rajcsányi-Molnár, University of Dunaújváros

• István András, University of Dunaujvaros