“Emotional Intelligence, Interpersonal Process Effectiveness, and Entrepreneurial Performance”

2014

Amy Ingram Whitney O Peake Wayne Stewart Warren E Watson

Scholars note the importance of emotion and cognition in entrepreneurship, thus we develop and test a novel partial mediation model of emotional intelligence, interpersonal processes, and venture performance in a large sample of entrepreneurs, defined as venture owner-managers. We also test the moderating effect of gender on the proposed relationships. The results indicate that emotional intelligence has both a direct effect on venture performance, and an indirect effect on venture performance via interpersonal processes. Gender moderated the direct effect, with males reporting higher performance, but was not significant in the indirect path of the model. We discuss the implications and potential avenues for future research on this important topic.

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