EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE SWORD OF WOMEN ENTREPRENEUR: IN INDIA

International Journal of Mechanical and Production Engineering Research and Development (IJMPERD) ISSN (P): 2249–6890; ISSN (E): 2249–8001 Vol. 10, Issue 3, Jun 2020, 3323-3330 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE SWORD OF WOMEN ENTREPRENEUR: IN INDIA Dr. PRATIMA DAIPURIA & SOMYA JAIN Professor, JIMS, Rohini, Delhi, India Research Scholar, JIMS, Rohini, Delhi, India ABSTRACT The increasing number of women entrepreneurs across the globe have approved the myth that emotional intelligence is integrated only with men. Women are wired with an innate sense of emotional intelligence which capacitate equally successful with men. Emotional intelligence adds a new paradigm in business to women entrepreneurs. In-depth theoretical reflections from various articles, researches are presented in the paper to suggest the framework. The study shows the role of emotional intelligence as a decisive factor for the success of women entrepreneurs. Plus, factors holding women back like unaddressed family stress, Work-Life balance, Stereotypes and Unconscious bias. The increasing number of companies founded by women show the entrepreneurial landscape which ultimately navigates towards business growth.

Received: Jun 06, 2020; Accepted: Jun 26, 2020; Published: Jul 13, 2020; Paper Id.: IJMPERDJUN2020316

INTRODUCTION Today, business and entrepreneurship are no more defined by genders. In India, the traditional mindset often forms a barrier to the entry of more women into businesses and other entrepreneurial activities. Some women

Original Article

KEYWORDS: Women Entrepreneurs & Emotional Intelligence

entrepreneurs are rising above it being noticed due to sheer hard work and innovation. The changing times has led to increased participation of women in various business domains such s IT, finance, fashion, sports etc. Few success stories prove that a true entrepreneur succeeds in the face of challenges with sheer perseverance. First, Nina Lekhi, Founder of Baggit- Nina Lekhi is the creator behind one of the most popular retail brands in India. At the age of 18, Nina and her friend stumbled upon as idea of creating bags with attitude and this began a handbag empire. Her love for colours is one of the fundamentals of Baggit. Second, Radhika Aggarwal, Co-Founder and CMO of ShopCluesRadhika was one of the first women to break into the startup space as a co-founder of ShopClues. She has around 14 years of experience in marketing. She backs the popular household online retailer as a CMO. Radhika Aggarwal of an E-commerce marketplace shop clues made history as India’s first female co-founder of a billion-dollar company. Women are always considered as better than men in terms of handling the issues, taking, criticisms, confronting the situation and passive over tough predicaments.

India Statistics says out of the 58.5 million entrepreneurs in India, nearly 14% are women. Indian womenowned businesses employ 13.45 million people. About 1/3 of Indian women entrepreneurs work in the agriculture sector, followed by manufacturing and retail trade. In 2017, only 2% of startup funding went to a woman founder.

The top 10 fundraises of 2017 added up to $8.5 billion. The top fundraises by a female-led startup accounted by only $136 million. A 2015 study by Mckinsey Global Institute shows India’s GDP could rise by between 16-60% by 2025 if women participated equally with men in the economy. Projections show that this could mean a whopping

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$2.9 trillion added to the economy. 30% of India’s tech workforce is female. Although, 51% of entry-level jobs in India’s IT and BPM industries are women, indicating that women are leaving at junior and mid-levels (Siegfried, 2019).

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Emotional Intelligence “Emotional Intelligence is the measure of an individual’s abilities to recognize and manage their emotions and the emotions of other people, both individually and in groups”. People with higher emotional intelligence always find an easier way to maintain an interpersonal relationship and a better understanding of their psychological state. Emotional intelligence enables an individual to identify and express emotions, relate emotional adjustment which plays a vital role in self-motivation and a means to motivate others. Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions to assist thought to understand emotions and emotional knowledge and to reflectively regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth (Freedman, 2017).

Women tend to be better at emotional empathy than men, Goleman (1998) wrote in Psychology today. Ranking high in emotional intelligence gives women an edge when it comes to building relationships. Women’s empathy and relationship building ability allow them to quickly build influence with others. They can read a room and gauge what the peripheral audience thinks of the situation.

Women Entrepreneur Women entrepreneur may be defined as a woman or group of women who initiate, organize and run a business enterprise.

In terms of Schumpeterian concept of innovative entrepreneurs, women who innovate, imitate or adopt a business activity are called “women entrepreneurs”. The Government of India has defined women entrepreneurs based on women participation in equity and employment of a business enterprise. Accordingly, the government of India (GOI2006) has defined women entrepreneur as “an enterprise owned and controlled by women having a minimum financial interest of 51% of the capital and giving at least 51% of the employment generated in the enterprise to women”. However, this definition is subject to criticism mainly on the condition of employing more than 50% of women workers in the enterprises owned and run by the women. Some facts about Indian women entrepreneur: 

Women constitute 48.9% of Indians

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Off all directors of startups, 35% are women

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Women constitute 14% of the total entrepreneurs in India.

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About 58% of women entrepreneurs started their business between the ages of 20 and 30.

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About 25% of women started their business even before turning 25.

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About 73% of women entrepreneurs report revenue of under Rs. 10, 00,000 in a financial year.

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About 35% of women entrepreneurs had a co-founder.

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About 71% of women employ around 5 or fewer people

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Top 5 Indian cities with women entrepreneurs: Bangalore, Delhi-NCR, Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE Impact Factor (JCC): 8.8746

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Similar to masculine notions of entrepreneurship, research suggests that leadership is associated with masculine traits (Eagly & Karau, 2002). While the association of masculinity with leadership can result in bias against female leaders (Eagly, Makhijani & Klonsky, 1992), a reframing of gender identity suggests that there can be a female advantage for leadership (Eagly, 2007; Helgesen 1990; Rosener, 1990).

In 2017, Shimiln researched Saudi Arab to understand the key factors of women entrepreneurship which are positive and negative factors like stress, family responsibilities, culture, demographic factors affects the women to become independent as proving as the negative factors and various factors like business skills to earn money, freedom, personal ambitions, unemployment and job dissatisfaction influence women positively to start up their own business and become an independent personality.

In 2015, Arun K.V and Haris Unnipulan studied the various factors affecting the women entrepreneurship and the results indicated that women are facing different situations or challenges in different areas. Women are highly affected by their families and society. The author analyzed the women entrepreneurs in various countries and found that women are facing the problems like a lake of financial support, scope in their areas, cultural restrictions, family support, lack of knowledge, difficulties in assessing loans and restricted mobility.

In 2013, Shikha Mahajan conducted a research study to analyze the position of women entrepreneur in India and it was found that various factors like domestic commitments, gender inequality, financial problems, family problems and lack of emotional support found as the significant factors that put their impacts on the women to restrain them to start or run a business.

In 2013, Vijaya Mani has revealed the major factors influencing the work-life balance of women professionals in India such as role conflict, lack of recognition, organizational politics, gender discrimination, quality of health, problems in time management and lack of proper social support.

A study based on the integrative model of Petrides and Furnham’s (2001) examined the relationships between trait EI and work-related constructs. Gender-specific perspective was adopted to take into account existing gender differences in work-related variables as well as the perception of EI (Furnham, 1994:Petrides, Furnham and Martin, 2004). Male and female data has been merged by many empirical studies even though there are reasons to believe that systematic differences in how the two genders experience the workplace and its demand exist (Roxburg, 1996).

Based on the review of literature on the above subject is has been identified that there is a dearth of studies highlighting the internal linkage between factors that are holding women back for entrepreneurship and emotional intelligence. Therefore the following objectives have been identified: 

Highlighting the linkage between the identified factors and emotional intelligence.

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Providing a conceptual framework on the identified factor and emotional Intelligence.

Based on a review of literature, few factors have been identified and are mapped with emotional intelligence as a

conceptual framework (Figure 1).

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Figure 1: Proposed Conceptual Framework.

LIMITATIONS Lack of Family Support Women, much more than hold concerns about balancing work and family. And too many workplaces contribute to those concerns. Some hold women to a second-tier “mommy track” for advancement; others shut women out of key responsibilities if they take their full parental leave. Lots of models exist for policies that help employees remain productive while caring for their families and they benefit men as well as women (Daskal, 2017).

Work-Life Balance A healthy work-life balance assumes great significance for working women particularly in the current context in which both, the family and the workplace have posed several challenges and problems for women. Besides to succeed in one environment, working women are often called upon to make sacrifices in another as each of the environments make different demands (Sundaresan, 2014).

It is generally considered that employees with higher emotional intelligence will have higher work-life balance.

This is because the employees with higher emotional intelligence can cope with consequences which may arise out of stress whereas those with less emotional intelligence won’t be in a position to overcome the stressful situations.

Stereotypes Unhelpful stereotypes mean women are held back, even before entering the jobs market. Entrenched expectations of senior women in business and testosterone-fuelled boardrooms must change before we will see true diversity. And without a talent pool of rising stars at every level, female representation on boards cannot increase (Parfitt, 2015).

Some men are empathetic as the most interpersonally sensible women are while some women are just as able to withstand stress as the most emotionally resilient men. After taking into account overall ratings for men and women, the strengths and weakness average out, so it is a competition between both sexes. Findings of studies reported by King (1999), Sutarso (1999), Wing and love (2001) and Singh (2002) revealed that females have higher emotional intelligence than that of males.

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Unconscious Bias Female candidates tend to be judged on experience, whereas male candidates are assessed on potential and that interviews are more likely to question women than men on their ability to balance work and family life. Hiring committees must consider candidates on equal terms if they are to avoid putting women immediately on the back foot through unconscious choices (Paula, 2015).

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND WOMEN ENTREPRENEUR The female entrepreneur is defined as those who use their knowledge and resource to develop or create new business opportunities, who are actively involved in managing their businesses and own at least 50% of the business and have been in operation for longer than a year (Brunetto, 2009) Research study revealed that emotional intelligence can affect entrepreneurship. Managers with high emotional intelligence have better entrepreneurial behaviour (Bahadori, 2012).

Krishnaveni (2011) in their study on diagnosing the employees, emotional intelligence in the IT/ITES sector of south India have found out that women scored higher than men in perceptive skills and overall emotional intelligence. This is in line with the findings of the previous studies conducted by Goldenberg (2006), Warner (2004) and Reddy (2012) in the study observed that female employees have more emotional intelligence than male employees.

DISCUSSIONS Many leaders, entrepreneurs and business owners have traditionally been men who followed a formula of aggression and intimidation to get to the top. Now many women are trying out that same formula to see where it can take them. As an entrepreneur, a women entrepreneur has also to perform all the functions involved in establishing an enterprise.

In an intriguing study by the Hay group (2019), it was found that high levels of emotional intelligence were found in a work situation where women executives were required to lead by influence rather than direct authority. In this study, emotional intelligence skills were more prevalent in executive-level women than their male counterparts. To survive in a male-dominated environment women are programmed to use logic, sometimes to the exclusion of intuition. Emotional intelligence competencies distinguished high performers where the role of self-management and relationship management showed higher results in entrepreneurial success. High emotional intelligence in women can better solve problems more efficiently and to control their emotions which result in creating a conducive work environment. Thus, this study points out the significance of emotional intelligence as a success tool for entrepreneurial success on a bigger scale among women entrepreneurs.

CONCLUSIONS By conducting this study, it was identified that work-family life, stereotypes, unconscious bias, lack of family support are important factors that holding women back for great work and performance. Emotional intelligence has a significant effect on persons work-life equation and contributes significantly towards maintaining a proper balance in professional and personal life. “Women make great entrepreneur because they are flexible and agile. They can see the direction they thought they should take their company in isn’t working and they regroup and change course for the better with much deliberation.” Danita Harris, CEO, Rated M. The above study shows why the starts up need more women entrepreneurs as compared to men for the growth and success of the company.

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