Emotional Intelligence Effectiveness

Emotional Intelligence and Job Performance and Leadership Effectiveness

Up to this point, intelligence has been analyzed as a general capacity, but there are specific components of intelligence that interact with daily life. Emotional intelligence is a clear example of this phenomenon. Daniel Goleman (2006) defines emotional intelligence as the ability to “recognize, understand and manage our own emotions [...] and recognize, understand and influence the emotions of others”

Recent findings established that emotionally intelligent people are better performers than their partners with not such intelligence (Law, Song, & Wong, 2004; Van Rooy & Viswesvaran, 2004), but it is important to say that most of these associations are based on self-reported

Lopes, Daisy Grewal, Jessica Kadis, Michelle Gall and Peter Salovey from the University of Surrey in conjunction with Yale University, conducted an experiment with analysts and clerical employees from a finance department of an insurance company. They administered the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT V2.0; Mayer,Salovey & Caruso, 2002). The MSCEIT includes eight tasks.

To assess Perceiving Emotions, employees described the emotions in photos of faces and landscapes. For Using Emotion, respondents identified emotions with non-emotional vocabulary and indicate the feelings that may interfere with the successful performance of some cognitive and behavioral tasks. Understanding Emotions was assessed with tasks in relation with the manner in which emotions change and how some feelings are provoked by blends of emotions. Managing Emotions was assessed throughout a series of scenes in which some people rate the effectiveness of different strategies to regulate their own feelings and of others in social

Although this main analyses were focused on total emotional intelligence, they found that all four emotional intelligence subscales, and in particular, the managing emotions subscale, were associated with some of this outcomes. Their findings extend some of the past researches that revealed some associations between those self-report measures of emotional intelligence such as job performance (e.g., Law et al., 2004).

Health and Mortality

Intelligence has also been linked with various health behaviors and outcomes in two different scales. While more intelligent people seem to have greater physical fitness, preference for low-sugar and low-fat diets and higher longevity; less intelligent people seem to go the other way around. Alcoholism, infant mortality, smoking and obesity have been shown to be correlated to lower intelligence, according to Gottfredson and Deary (2004)

In order to illustrate this, we are going to take as example the results from one epidemiological study which correlates IQ in childhood to mortality: the Scottish Mental Survey 1932 (SMS,