Employers and mainly those the operate in an international context and interact in a multicultural environment want and look for employees who possess emotional competences, which influence and ease relationships between people, allow a better social cohesion, an emotional self-control and an "alphabetisation" of emotional states, and who work together for their personal benefit and not contrary to their expectations, needs and competences. An increasing number of specialists state that emotional intelligence is a central variable that affects leaders' performance. In this study, carried out in a sugar factory, we tried to characterise the internal environment of the organisation and the relationships that dominate them in order to identify and understand the situation the organisation is confronted with in terms of the relationship between managers and subordinates, empathy, nonverbal communication, self-control, handling relationships, emotional intelligence. We tried to provide exploratory evidence for the effects that emotional intelligence has on leaders and followers in terms of performance, results and work satisfaction. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.