We all know the importance of people skills. Cooperating well with others contributes to success in life as well as effective leadership. Academics call this social intelligence. In an effort to better understand the relationship between leaders’ social intelligence, their creative performance and how these are influenced by culture, CEIBS Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management Tae-Yeol Kim has recently co-authored a cross-cultural study in five places: The US and UK (individualist cultures) Scotland (a moderate individualist culture , and  Hong Kong and Thailand (collectivist culture).

There are four components to social intelligence: situational awareness, situational response, cognitive empathy and social skills. The results of Prof. Kim’s study show that there are links between a leader’s ability to effectively size-up a social situation (situational awareness) and adapt to it (situational response) and their ability to create new ideas for processes, procedures, strategies, products and services. The results also show that higher creative performance is linked to higher overall social intelligence. Culture does not seem to play a role – the results were the same in all countries studied.

Based on these findings, the researchers suggest that companies should encourage managers to acquire the social intelligence competencies they need to improve their creative performance and their subordinates’ job performance and satisfaction. They also suggest that even though education and training are useful ways to improve supervisors’ social intelligence, they may not be enough to raise their creative performance. Companies may also need to focus on recruiting managers with vision and charisma who are likely to have a high social intelligence.

The results of the study can be found in the paper titled “A Cross-cultural Model of Leaders’ Social Intelligence and Creative Performance” which has been published by Current Topics in Management. Prof. Kim’s co-authors are M. Afzalur Rahim of the Center for Advanced Studies in Management, Sajjad M. Jasimuddin of Kedge Business School and Songsri Soranastaporn of Mahidol University.