Does Emotional Intelligence Contribute to Quality of Strategic Decisions? The Mediating Role of Open Innovation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Congratulating the authors for the introduction of constructs such as emotional intelligence in the decision-making process in the business environment, it seems to me an interesting and necessary topic.

I have some recommendations on the manuscript:

The introductory section should include more relevant work and citations from recent years. In some cases, sources from more than a decade ago are used. 

Hypotheses should be formulated in terms of relationships between variables (not about the impact of one variable on another).

Sociodemographic characteristics of the sample participants should be described in section 3.1. 

As part of the procedure, they should mention something about ethical aspects of the research ... was the study submitted to an ethics committee? Was the informed consent of the participants collected? What? This should be clearly specified in the text. 

The instruments used for data collection, were they standardized instruments? If this is not the case, they may indicate it as a limitation of the study.

The adjustment indices do not provide minimum values considered by the scientific literature.

Please review this and justify the values obtained with the corresponding dimensions. In the discussion section, you should not introduce new citations that have not been previously cited in the introduction (please check this 51, 52). 

Thanks for your job!

Author Response

Dear respected reviewer

Kindly find attached our response to your valuable comments.

Regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to congratulate the authors on the manuscript they have submitted. Content aside, the investigative and scientific work is original and innovative.

The scope of the study is well presented and sustained on relevant and appropriate literature.

However, I suggest some brief recommendations:

• The meaning of UAE must be explained at the beginning of the manuscript.
• The Introduction is too extensive and a bit confusing. In the Introduction (throughout the article) the ideas are not connected, and the speech is not fluid. I also find that the Introduction contains unnecessary information. The Introduction should clearly identify the objectives of the research, the process of the investigation and the different ways in which this article is expected to contribute to the literature should be explicitly indicated.
• The explanation of the objectives of the research should appear similar and the same focus throughout the manuscript (verify the abstract, the line 33/34 vs 111-115 vs 523/524).
• The literature review should be improved, insofar as:

All references are prior to 2020, most prior to 2010.

The literature review on topics such as "emotional intelligence", "open innovation", IIS and "strategic decisions" should be reinforced.

Table 1 should appear at the end of the literature review and mention the authors cited in the text.

Eight subtopics in literature review is too much.

• In the methodology, it is missed to explain the process and the type of methodology used.
• The model is not sufficiently explained, based on the literature that supports the model.
• When results are discussed, further explanations of the possible reasons behind the hypotheses that are supported and that are not supported are necessary.
• The citation standards required by this journal are not met. Please check this issue.
• A correction of the written language in English is recommended.

So, the topic addressed is interesting and very relevant nowadays. However, the manuscript shows a lack of robustness and weak interrelationship in the analysis of the results obtained. I also recommend a review of the bibliographic sources, the respective intra-investigation and inter-investigation analysis, highlighting these scientific contributions with the results obtained from your investigation. In this way, the work will become more scientifically coherent and robust. I recommend reformulating the objectives and research questions and/or improve the methodology and the literature review related to the core of the investigation.

Kind Regards.

Author Response

Dear respected reviewer

Kindly find attached our response to your valuable comments.

Regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for taking my comments into consideration.

Although I think the article has improved, I still have several comments and suggestions that make a new revision necessary: I hope that, in this following round, these comments may be considered, since their objective is simply to improve the quality of your article. Good luck!

• The literature review should be improved integrating more studies, and more recent (only 7 references have later 2015). By this improvement, the confrontation of the results with more relevant literature will be more robust.
• The conclusion must be improved, since that it is an important part of the research, and only have few commentaries about the objectives and the results. The presentation of the results obtained should be improved. The authors should also mention the methodology. There also should be explained the theoretical and practical implications of the investigation.

Author Response

Dear and honorable reviewer. We much appreciate that you provide us a chance to improve our manuscript. First of all, we would like to thank the reviewer for the kind remarks and suggestions. After incorporating these suggestions and recommendations, they have clearly made our manuscripts more polished in a better way.

Here is the detail of all the suggestions and how we incorporated them in our manuscript. The manuscript has ‘Track Changes’ on, so reviewers can also view from the original file.

Report 2 (Round 2):

Comment 1: The literature review should be improved integrating more studies, and more recent (only 7 references have later 2015). By this improvement, the confrontation of the results with more relevant literature will be more robust.

Response 1: As advised we have added five more references into the literature review, and all the references are from 2018-2021. The results section has also been updated with reference to these new studies in literature review section. Please review ‘Track Changes’ in section 2 and 5. See references no. [24][34][38][40][58]

Comment 2: The conclusion must be improved, since that it is an important part of the research, and only have few commentaries about the objectives and the results.

Response 2: As advised the section 6 ‘Conclusions’ has been modified as per suggestions. Please review ‘Track Changes’ in section 6.

Comment 3: The presentation of the results obtained should be improved.

Response 3: Following your kind recommendation, we edit the results discussion section in order to improve this section. Please review ‘Track Changes’ in section 5.

Comment 4: The authors should also mention the methodology.

Response 4: An extra explanation has been added to describe the methodology in details. Kindly see Section 3 of the study (methodology), and it is titled as ‘Methodology and Research Design’.

Comment 5: There also should be explained the theoretical and practical implications of the investigation.

Response 5: We have added two separate sub-headings of Theoretical and Practical implications in section 7. Please review ‘Track Changes’ in section 7 (7.1, 7.2).

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for taking my comments into consideration. Congratulations!

In this new version the quality of your article is really improved.