Business process management (BPM) is a popular topic at the beginning of the 21st century, because it is very important from a practical point of view, but at the same time a significant challenge for scientists and theoreticians, primarily in the field of business management, but also from other social and technical disciplines, considering multidisciplinary nature of the phenomenon [1]. BMP can be considered as a sum of all methods, tools, procedures, techniques, technologies, information system and software supporting business processes through planning, design, flow, monitoring, analysis, control, change and process improvement [2]. Therefore, it may be said that BPM is a predefined and structured approach that enables business processes to be analyzed and enhanced. Also, BPM is defined as a holistic management approach, which is focused on identifying, defining, implementing, measuring, monitoring, analyzing and continually improving business processes of the company [3]. Holistic perspective of BPM is actually based on soft elements of this business management approach. On this, soft side of BPM, very important element is business culture, as the way employees behave and shared values that become visible in actions and structures, since BPM initiatives often fail for cultural reasons [4]. In order to be supportive for business process management, and in that case represent process management culture, it must have the following characteristics: full commitment of all employees, knowledge sharing, on-going learning and innovation, trust and mutual respect between employees regardless of position, empowerment and participation of employees in decision-making process, managers’ support, managing by facts. However, beside business culture, utilisation of employees’ potentials also depends on adequate communication or interpersonal relationships within an enterprise. One of the reasons that may influence interpersonal relationships is emotional intelligence of employees.

Holistic perspective of BPM actually appeared when Business culture (BC) was recognized as one of the key elements in BPM practice, although the results of the research provided evidence that BC is still a widely under?researched topic in BPM [5]. In addition, BPM initiatives often fail for cultural reasons [4]. Important characteristics of BC supportive for BPM, or process management culture, are: full commitment of all employees, knowledge sharing, on-going learning and innovation, trust and mutual respect between employees regardless of position, empowerment and participation of employees in decision-making process, managers’ support, managing by facts. Probably an enterprise will not be able to provide all of mentioned characteristics in short period of time, but culture change is not an easy task and needs some time and persistence. Vom Brocke and Sinnl [5] provide a summary of how culture is perceived in BPM research. They identify the following four relationships:

• Culture as an independent factor influencing BPM: culture is perceived as a success factor or a barrier for BPM.
• Culture as a dependent factor influenced by BPM: BPM systems or general BPM initiatives are recognized as affecting culture through structure changes.
• Culture as BPM culture: BPM culture generally describes a culture supportive of BPM objectives and can be understood as a specific aspect of an organizational culture.
• Culture as an aspect of BPM: BPM requires attention to culture.

Authors [6-7] that have been analyzed the relationship between business culture and business process management usually used four types of culture: clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy. Clan culture is characterized by a friendly workplace, where teamwork and employee development are emphasized and the organization promotes loyalty, tradition, participation, and commitment. Adhocracy culture is characterized by a dynamic, entrepreneurial, and creative working environment, where people take risks and value innovation, agility and experimentation. Such organizations emphasize acquiring new resources, creating new opportunities and rapid growth. Market culture is a result-oriented workplace focused on goals and creating the competitive advantage. The main values that dominate market-type organizations are profitability, competitiveness, productivity, and goal achievement. Hierarchy culture is characterized by a formal work environment, where structure, control, coordination, and efficiency are emphasized and procedures govern people`s activities. Similar systematisation of business culture has been given by [8]. Who identified also four types of business culture: group, rational, developmental, and hierarchical culture? The relationship between culture and process management success has been issue of analysis and discussion by many authors. There are research results that include culture in the list of factors affecting process management implementation success. Some of them show that impact of culture on the success of BPM is evident [9]. Others suggest that some types of culture provide better environment for BPM success, such as clan culture, compared to some other, like hierarchical culture [6]. There are authors that observed culture impact on performances from the employee perspective, concluding that (learning) culture has a positive direct impact on all three aspects of non-financial performance: performance from the employee, customer, and supplier perspectives. In their earlier work, in order to evaluate the impact of business culture on business process management adoption success, Schmiedel vom Brocke and Recker [10] based their analysis on eight culture elements, identified by:

• Customer orientation refers to the responsiveness for internal and external customers' needs,
• Excellence refers to the orientation towards optimality in process performance through discipline, quality awareness and sustainability,
• Development refers to the orientation towards continuous change and innovation through open mindedness, creativity and risk awareness,
• Leadership refers to professional integrity, responsibility, competence and pragmatism,
• Determination refers to the feeling of ownership, ambition, motivation and commitment towards process objectives,
• Cooperation refers to transparency amongst stakeholders, cross-functionality and the orientation towards constructiveness in communication,
• Entirety refers to an integrated view on an organization oriented towards business processes as opposed to functional units,
• Strategy awareness refers to the orientation towards growth and competitive advantage through awareness for the alignment of resources.

In their recent work, the same authors suggest the framework for business culture analysis that contains four types of organizational cultures: collaborate, compete, create, and control, which represent the combination of the two dimensions (4):

• The “focus” dimension differentiates an internal (teamwork) from an external (customer orientation) focus of an organization,
• The “structure” dimension is determined by the two extremes of flexibility (excellence) and stability (responsibility).

In the last two decades, as one of the working environment factor, emotional intelligence draws attention of many authors. The importance of emotional intelligence of employees has been confirmed by numerous empirical studies that have shown a close relationship between the level of emotional intelligence development and the ability of employees to solve conflicts, creativeness, the quality of leadership, etc. [11-13]. Also, the researchers have shown that emotional intelligence is an important determinant of employees` performances, which directly affect the performances at an enterprise level [14-16] further believes that emotional intelligence in its broadest sense is the ability to recognize and regulate one`s own, and others' emotions. Bar-On also sees emotional intelligence in a broad sense and defines it as the effective understanding of oneself and the others, the ability to establish good interpersonal relationships and adequate coping and adaptation to the environment in which the individual is [17]. Generally, positive impact of emotional intelligence on employees` performances and the performances of companies could be found in the fact that many activities they perform in the companies have interpersonal character, require communication, cooperation and exchange of information [14,18]. This leads to the assumption that emotional intelligence may have positive impact on working environment and values and attitudes, employees’ behaviour is based on or business culture. Although there are results concerning analysis of the impact of business culture on process management success, as well as results concerning analysis of the impact of emotional intelligence on some types of culture, such as collaborative culture or on cultural intelligence to the best knowledge of the authors, there is no evidence about the role of emotional intelligence in enhancing or inhibiting the impact of business culture on process management success. Therefore, the research question that this research should answer is whether greater level of emotional intelligence can intensifies the impact of process oriented culture on business process management implementation success [19-23].

Since the analysis is based under the triangle BC, BPM and emotional intelligence (EI), it is necessary to provide indicators for all three dimensions of the research model. The model is presented in (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The research framework.

For measuring the success of BPM adoption, bearing in mind previous aspects of process management, authors suggest usage of Business process orientation (BPO) maturity model [24]. Which assumes evaluation of the BPM implementation from the three aspects: Process Jobs, Process Management and Process View [6]?

The analysis of BC, as supportive element for BPM, is based on so-called constituting (CERT) values of the BPM culture concept. CERT is actually an acronym meaning:

• Customer orientation - the proactive and responsive attitude towards the needs of process output recipients, with two sub-elements external customer orientation and internal customer orientation,
• Excellence - the orientation towards continuous improvement and innovation to achieve superior process performance, with two sub-elements continuous improvement and innovation,
• Responsibility - the commitment to process objectives and the accountability for process decisions, with two sub-elements accountability and commitment,
• Teamwork - the positive attitude towards cross-functional collaboration, with two sub-elements formal structures and informal structures.

Finally, the level of emotional intelligence has been assessed based on Goleman’s combined model, which consists of non-cognitive and cognitive abilities of individuals that enable them to successfully overcome the challenges in everyday life (16). It includes five elements: self-consciousness, self-control, self-motivation, empathy, social skills [25].

According to the framework of the research, EI represents a mediating variable, which influences the relationship between BC and BPMIS (Business Process Management Implementation Success). Therefore, the main objective of the research is to identify whether EI can accelerate positive correlation between the observed variables. Bearing in mind mentioned types of culture, the task of the research also is to check on which type of BC and EI has the greatest impact. Therefore, the following hypotheses have been formulated:

• There is statistically significant impact of BC on BPMIS,
• There is statistically significant impact of EI on BPMIS,
• The presence of EI elements intensifies the relationship between BC and BPMIS.

Hypothesis testing has been done on the sample consisting of 66 completely fulfilled questionnaires (response rate was 22%), by the managers of production enterprises from Serbia. Beside, general questions, the questionnaire included three groups of questions, concerning: business process management implementation, business culture characteristics and emotional intelligence presence, all based on managers assessment on five-point Likert scale. Collected data have been analysed through SPSS software and analysis involved regression and correlation analysis.

Before the begining of the analysis, based on certain statistical tools, reliability of the collected data has been checked. Since Cronbah’s Aplha test has shown that the data concerning Customer focus as sub-element of BC, Empathy as sub-element of EI should be excluded from the analysis, as well as the Process measurement and management and Process view as sub-elements of BPMIS, with the Alpha value 0.898, the data for all other sub-elements are considered as reliable for further processing. In this way, the model that is subject of the analysis includes four independent variables. With the sample 66, the aplication of regression analysis is possible, according to the assumption that sample size has to be 15 times the number of independent variables (which is 15*4). (Table 1) shows descriptive statistics for all observed variables, dependant and independant. The first three variables concern BC elements, the second four concern EI elements, while the last one represents the element of BPMIS. As it can be seen from the (Table 1), the greatest value, when it is about BC elements has Responsibility, followed by Excellence. Responsibility is also characterised by the lowest standard deviation, which means that interviewees are agree on this issue, to a great extent. Further, this means that enterprises in the sample are characterized by the commitment to process objectives and the accountability for process decisions, but also by the orientation towards continuous improvement and innovation to achieve superior process performance. On the other hand, Self-control and Self-assessment are the two EI elements with the highest mark and lowest standard deviation. Regression analysis concerning BC impact on BPMIS has shown that this impact is positive and statistical significant. The normality of the sample is confirmed by Cook's (max value less than 1) and Mahalanobis (13.725 or less than corresponding Chi-square critical value, which is 16.27) distance. Based on the results presented in (Table 2), it can be seen that two BC elements with statistically significant impact on BPMIS are Excellence and Responsibility. Regression analysis concerning EI impact on BPMIS has shown that this impact is positive and statistical significant. The normality of the sample is confirmed by Cook's (max value less than 1) and Mahalanobis (12.218 or less than corresponding Chi-square critical value, which is 18.47) distance. Based on the results presented in (Table 3), it can be seen that two EI elements with statistically significant impact on BPMIS are Self-control and Social skills. By comparing these results with the descriptive analysis it can be noticed that the good thing is that Self-control is assessed as the most present EI element in business practice of the enterprises in the sample. However, bearing in mind their impact on BPMIS, Social skills should be developed and improved. (Table 4) indicates that between two observed variables, BC and BPMIS there is statistically significant positive correlation. Actually, correlation analysis confirms the results of the regression analysis, since the greatest correlation coefficient there is between Responsibility and Process jobs (0.632). Positive correlation also characterises the relationship between BC elements. Partial correlation coefficients, when EI impact is excluded shows that assumed mediating role of EI in the observed relationship, certainly exist. Correlation coefficients in this case are significantly smaller compared to the results in the (Table 4), thus indicating that without EI presence, as a support element of process management, impact of business culture would be negligible. This result indicates that the third hypothesis has been confirmed (Table 5).

Table 1: Descriptive measures.

 Table 2: Regression coefficients: BC impact on BPMIS.

 Table 3: Regression coefficients: EI impact on BPMIS.

 Table 4: Pearson correlation coefficients between BC and BPMIS.

Table 5: Pearson Correlation coefficients: EI impact excluded.

Business culture is usually listed as one of the soft factors of process management. Different research results confirmed the existence of business culture impact on business process management. However, authors considered important to examine possibilities to increase business culture impact on business process management, especially if it is positive. In this paper authors analysed the possibility to use emotional intelligence in order to accelerate positive impact of business culture on business process management. The results of regression and correlation analysis confirmed the hypotheses of the research. Therefore, the main conclusion is that the presence of emotional intelligence elements intensifies the relationship between business culture and business process management implementation success. The main limitation of the study certainly is sample size, which should be increased in order to get more confident results. Also, one of the limitations that could hardly be eliminated is subjectivity of interviewees. Anyway, besides eliminating mentioned limitations, authors suggest that further research should involve different methods and techniques for increasing emotional intelligence in an enterprise, and explore possibilities for their implementation in the business practice in order to provide better internal environment for business process management implementation. If business culture relies on and promotes business process management values, and emotional intelligence is present so its positive impact on business culture accelerates business process management implementation, it may be said that an enterprise provides the context where process orientation is natural internal environment. In this sense, business culture and emotional intelligence represent a springboard for providing business process implementation success.

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