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and identify problems (Bower, 1981; Salovey & Birnbaum, 1989). Emotionally intelligent leaders use their knowledge of these effects of moods to awaken their employees' creativity through affect timing and affect balance. Positive moods can be taken advantage of by having followers think up of potential opportunities and have enough optimism to envision improvement and success. On the other hand, negative moods can be exploited by channeling it in the direction of problem recognition and creative problem solving, eventually enhancing the individual's self esteem with the acknowledgement of his contribution instead of gradual withdrawal from the workplace. Even frustration of a worker due to a job-related problem, can be utilized by emotionally intelligent leaders. Both can thresh out the issues and causes of such negative emotion and eventually help the employee to become aware of the problem and adopt a more proactive demeanor in creatively solving it (Zhou & George, 2003).

Conflicts are bound to arise in groups especially when gathering information for creative tasks. Different personalities and backgrounds, level of creativity skills and knowledge may result in disagreements on the standards and boundaries of information to seek. Leaders with high emotional intelligence are able to manage followers' emotions, and help followers achieve a productive balance. More specifically, leaders with high emotional intelligence can accurately sense when followers are losing patience or becoming frustrated with not being able to obtain necessary resources, and when followers become happy and satisfied with their progress prematurely. Because a leader with high emotional intelligence understands the causes and consequences of emotions, he is likely to identify the reason why his followers experience both positive and negative moods. His accurate perceptions enable him to manage and balance the negative and positive emotions and successfully prod the employee to persist in gathering information and staying on-task.

Emotional intelligence will help leaders in encouraging their followers to be open to new learning, and approach new tasks with enthusiasm and optimism rather than with trepidation and dread. It may also happen that followers can be overly excited about new information that they remain in the information gathering stage without any clear goals or efforts to use the information in creative endeavors. Leaders high on emotional intelligence are able to manage their followers' moods so they achieve a balance and focus instead of being carried away by their own exuberance (Zhou & George, 2003).

Emotionally intelligent leaders are fully aware that implementation of creative ideas may involve both positive and negative emotions throughout the process and employees may be on an 'emotional roller-coaster'. These leaders provide their followers with the appropriate encouragement and flexibility and a collective sense of ownership. The need to be flexible themselves should be addressed by leaders and they should be willing to abandon a plan when a more superior and creative idea is born. In situations when negative emotions associated with ownership issues in idea implementation emerge, leaders should be able to manage such emotions so that negative feelings will not adversely affect the idea implementation process. Such leaders will have the emotional know-how to guide their followers and th