IMPORTANCE OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IN STARTUPS

The purpose of this thesis was to see a correlation between startup’s success and level of emotional intelligence of interviewed startup team leaders. It was achieved by conducting interviews with team leaders of startups and literature research on the emotional intelligence. In order to assess the answers and analyze the result from the interviews fraud behaviors and biased answers were taking into account by studying related practices. There were two main questions for this research: 1) Is there connection between startup’s success and its emotional intelligence? 2) Does any element of emotional intelligences stand alone in a successful startup? Emotional intelligence consists of five elements: self-awareness – ability of an individual to understand own emotion and the effect they have on him or her; self-regulation – understanding the causes of emotions and managing them in productive manner; social skill – ability to identify and manage emotions of others in a productive manner; empathy – understanding, essentially non-verbal, expressions of emotions of others; motivation – productive and continuous achieving of goals set in align with own believes and purpose. Heat map was created to illustrate all five elements of emotional intelligence with assessed team leader’s possession level of those elements. Seven candidates chosen for interviews have all been participating in a Startup Journey event. This event is an accelerator program for startups. Out of 7 startups that took part in this event only one winner was announced. The winner demonstrated high possession in all five aspects of emotional intelligence. He showed one of best result among all team leaders, which may indicate that emotional intelligence has an effect on startup performance. Based on this research, there were 3 elements that showed to be the most crucial elements of emotional intelligence: self-regulation, motivation and empathy. Especially the latter, as only three team leaders demonstrated the sings of high possession of this element