combination of experiences of effective Federal government leaders in developing their
emotional intelligence. These patterns form the basis of the conclusions described in the
next section. One of the six themes – EI experiences are inherent for effective leadership
- is an overarching theme resonating across all other themes and is addressed as a
separate conclusion.
Conclusions
The four major conclusions that emerged from this study represent patterns
reconfigured from the six themes described above (Saldana, 2009), and relate directly to
the overarching research question, What are the experiences of effective Federal
government leaders in developing their emotional intelligence?
Conclusion 1: A diverse array of factors affect EI developmental experiences.
This conclusion synthesizes themes 1 (EI experiences manifest in different ways) and 6
(EI experiences are integrated with other aspects of workplace and personal life). Based
on the voices of participants, the results suggest that several attributes affect EI
developmental perspectives. Many of the participants expressed that EI was not thought
of consciously but, once raised to the level of awareness through the subject’s
participation in this study and the conversation that the Appendix A interview protocol
sparked, the participants were consistently able to vividly recall defining moments with
great clarity. At times, those defining moments were contextualized in terms of self-
awareness, gender, personality, maturity, emotion, and storytelling, among others.
Self-awareness was thought of introspective terms but also in the context of
absorbing what the participants had experienced or observed, and discerning whether
those experiences should be modeled or that the participant should choose alternate