Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers: A Case of Vietnam

Some of the literature showed that Emotional Intelligence (EI) plays an important role in project managers' interpersonal skills and personal competencies describe interpersonal skills. This paper studies whether project managers apply EI in their work and whether the application of EI can develop personal competencies of project managers by surveying experienced project managers in Vietnam. The survey questionnaire was sent individually to 100 experienced project managers in Vietnam and subsequently a total of 58 full responses were received. From the 6 units of personal competencies of Project Management Institute (PMI)'s Project Management Competence Development framework (PMCD), project managers are very good at Communicating and Managing while they have some gaps in Leading, Cognitive ability, Effectiveness and Professionalism. This research identified that EI can fix the gaps in personal competencies. Further, project managers applied EI in their work at basic level even though most of them do not know the concept of EI. Namely, they applied EI in the situations related to the first 2 building blocks of Mersino's EI framework (Self-awareness and Self-management domains) while there is a great opportunity for them to learn how to apply EI in other domains (Social awareness, Relationship management and Team leadership).

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