Organizational Excellence and How to Enhance It Through the Use of Emotional Leadership Style: An Analytical Study of the Opinions of a Sample of Faculty Members at the College of Administration and Economics, University of Kirkuk

The research problem of this study was to investigate how the emotional leadership is used to improve job engagement among faculty members using an applied research on a sample of professors at the College in Administration and Economics, University of Kirkuk. The research was conducted within a descriptive-analytical paradigm and a questionnaire, designed with the purpose of gathering the data, was used to conduct data collection process among a random sample of (120) male and female faculties. The theoretical framework was made of two axes. The former covered the issue of emotional leadership, its significance, goals and dimensions expressed through (self-awareness, self-management, motivation, and social awareness). The second axis was concerned with the idea of job engagement, its significance, purposes, and aspects (cognitive, behavioral, and emotional). The descriptive analysis results indicated that academic leaders of the college had high use of emotional leadership practice with the dimension of social awareness being the first in the list of dimensions. It was also found that job engagement was high among the members of the faculty, with the emotional dimension being prominent. The statistical analysis proved whether there was a strong positive statistically significant correlation between emotional leadership and job engagement. The results of the simple linear regression analysis indicated that emotional leadership has a statistically significant impact on job engagement because the emotional leadership described (46.8) the percentage of job engagement variance. In light of these results, the research found that the application of an emotional leadership style by academic leaders is rather effective in terms of improving job engagement in the faculty members and their role in academic process. The research proposed a list of recommendations that are very practical among them being: enhancing the development of emotional intelligence in leaders, implementing various forms of motivation, promoting a positive working atmosphere built on respect and effective communication, and the inclusion of faculty members in the decision-making process.