IMPACT OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE ON SOFTWARE PROJECT LEADERSHIP AND TEAM PERFORMANCE

Software projects have appalling 68% failure rates even after decades of agile practices and technological improvements, and thus, it is necessary to explore human factors outside of coding competencies. This sample-sized mixed-methods analysis (n=250 Pakistani software workers; 25 interviews) demonstrates that emotional intelligence (EI) is the ultimate predictor, which elucidates 61% of the team performance variance (R 2=0.61) based on SEM-established mediation pathways through which EI improves leadership effectiveness ( B=0.45, p=0.01), which then transfers to multidimensional high performance in terms of sprint velocity, defect reduction, cohesion, stress resilience, Correlation analysis shows empathy (r=0.68) and social skills (r=0.72) to be the most important drivers, whereas NVivo thematic analysis (κ=0.82) shows that retrospective empathy (28% dominance) turns blame cycles into learning loops, eliminating typical low-EI failures of the weak link nature. Uniform performance is observed in high-EI teams without performance bottlenecks that plague technical-only interventions and they do not accept the paradigm of IQ which establishes no relation between leadership variance and any other factor (R 2