How emotional intelligence can contribute to success
Emotional intelligence was traditionally regarded as a woolly concept that could not be measured by conventional IQ tests. However, recent studies and models have shown that people who understand, utilize and manage emotions can often enjoy greater professional success, regardless of their industry or position. Steinbeis Entrepreneur Dr. Gülsüm Üzüm presents a historical overview of emotional intelligence, introduces the main models, and discusses its relevance to job performance, management and HR development.
How emotional intelligence relates to attitude and performance (Source: Biemann, T./Weckmüller, H.)
Career development and emotional intelligence (Source: Biemann, T./Weckmüller, H.)
How emotional intelligence influences managers (Source: Biemann, T./Weckmüller, H.)
Recent years have seen the emergence of an alternative to the traditional model of intelligence that encompasses emotions rather than simply reducing intelligence to a set of cognitive abilities. Ewald Thorndike propounded the concept of social intelligence as long ago as the 1920s. He defined it as the ability to react optimally by recognizing internal patterns of behavior, motives and states in other people.[8] At around the same time, Louis Thurstone [1] described a model of intelligence based on seven relatively autonomous “primary mental abilities”. In 1976, Joy Paul Guilford [5] proposed a model of human intelligence comprising 120 different factors. But despite widespread criticism of the conventional model of intelligence, the concept of social intelligence never caught on and gradually fell into oblivion.
Up until the end of the 1960s, emotion and cognition were regarded as two different constructs in the literature. It was not until the “cognitive revolution” that emotions would also become the subject of academic discussion.[8] A couple of decades later, in the 1980s, Professor Howard Gardner put forward a model of intelligence comprising as many as seven intelligences, laying the foundation for the revised intelligence constructs that would be developed in future years.[3] Advances in neuroscience also prompted more research into the concept of emotion.
It was against this backdrop that, in 1990, the psychologists Peter Salovey, John D. Mayer and David R. Caruso published an article entitled “Emotional Intelligence”. Initially, their work received little attention from their fellow professionals. It was not until Daniel Goleman adopted the construct and developed his own popular science concept in his 1995 bestseller “Emotional Intelligence” that the term became more widely known.[4] Today, there are three main models of emotional intelligence: the ability model pioneered by Salovey, Mayer and Caruso, the mixed models proposed by the likes of Goleman and Reuven Bar-On, and the multi-level model of Zeidner et al. (2003), which combines the other two models and approaches them from a developmental psychology perspective.[6]
The four-branch model: perceiving, using, understanding and managing
Salovey, Mayer and Caruso’s ability model is the oldest academically substantiated model of emotional intelligence. It distinguishes between four interrelated cognitive abilities:
- Emotional perception: The ability to perceive and accurately interpret emotions in oneself and others through signals such as facial expressions and body language.
- Emotional integration: The ability to recognize how emotions affect your thoughts and to use emotions to facilitate cognitive processes.
- Emotional understanding: The ability to understand the relationship between different emotions.
- Emotional management: The deliberate management of your own emotions and those of others to promote intellectual and emotional growth. The first branch, “emotional perception”, is key to this ability, since in order to manage and understand emotions you must first be able to perceive them.
These abilities build on each other to form a hierarchy going from the basic foundation of emotional perception up to the most complex ability of emotional management.
Measuring emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence as defined by the ability model is measured using the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). This test is based on the earlier Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale (MEIS) and was adapted by Schütz et al. in 2011. Unlike the self-reporting methods used in the mixed models, the MSCEIT is a performance-based test that measures cognitive abilities. The authors based the MSCEIT on the MEIS, which was the first performance-based test for measuring emotional intelligence as defined by the four-branch model.[7]
How emotional intelligence can contribute to professional success
The concept of emotional intelligence has become increasingly important in HR development since it was first postulated. A meta-analysis with over 80,000 subjects carried out by Caglar Dogru (2022) found a moderate positive relationship between emotional intelligence and professional success.[2] Older studies also confirm this correlation. The effect size is greater than the Big Five personality traits (conscientiousness, openness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) and is similar to current estimations of the “predictive validity”[2] of conventional intelligence for job performance. Interestingly, while personality traits don’t share a common basis, emotional and general intelligence can be reduced to a single global factor.
Other studies such as Grobelny et al. (2021) show a consistently positive correlation between emotional intelligence and job performance, regardless of professional group. This correlation was detected, for example, among managers (r = 0.30), salespeople (r = 0.34), teachers (r = 0.29) and police officers (r = 0.42). Moreover, Pirsoul et al. (2023) found that individuals’ career-related outcomes are also affected by emotional intelligence.[2]
One criticism that people were quick to level at emotional intelligence is that it is nothing more than a combination of different personality traits and is thus of no practical use in human resource management. However, a meta-analysis by Andrei et al. (2016)[2] shows that emotional intelligence does have an additional explanatory value compared to conventional personality traits. The paper refers to this as incremental validity. Although small, this additional value is nonetheless statistically significant. It is inferred that, depending on the professional group, emotional intelligence influences both choice of management style and management effectiveness.
Training emotional intelligence
These positive effects raise an interesting question: can emotional intelligence be trained? There is certainly a lucrative market out there for training courses, checklists and practical guides. In a meta-analysis of 84 separate studies, Victoria Mattingly and Kurt Kraiger (2019) investigated the effectiveness of different instructional methods. One third of the studies used experimental designs with control groups, allowing causal inferences to be made about the methods’ effectiveness.
Moderate differences were found between the test scores of the study and control groups. The authors compare the effects of interventions to enhance emotional intelligence with other areas of application of HR development measures. The results show the effect sizes to be within the range of those found in a meta-analysis of training interventions in general (Arthur et al. 2003). However, there is still a lack of detailed evidence about the effectiveness of specific methods such as coaching, feedback or discussion groups.[2]
Contact
Dr. Gülsüm Üzüm (author)
Steinbeis Entrepreneur
Steinbeis Consulting Center for Criminology and Criminalistics (Stuttgart)