Emotional intelligence predicts job performance

Emotional intelligence is a strong predictor of job performance, according to a study conducted at Virginia Commonwealth University that helps settle the ongoing debate in a much-disputed area of research.

"The Relation Between Emotional Intelligence and Job Performance: A Meta-Analysis," which has been published online by the Journal of Organizational Behavior and will appear in a future issue of the journal, builds upon years of existing studies in the area of emotional intelligence, which is a measure of someone's ability to understand the emotions of themselves and others. The resulting analysis indicates that high emotional intelligence does have a relationship to strong job performance -- in short, emotionally intelligent people make better workers.

The study was conducted at the VCU School of Business by Ernest H. O'Boyle Jr., who ; Ronald H. Humphrey, professor of management at VCU; Jeffrey M. Pollack, at VCU and is now an assistant professor of management at the University of Richmond; Thomas H. Hawver, at VCU; and Paul A. Story, at VCU.

Humphrey edited a 2008 book in the field, Affect and Emotion: New Directions in Management Theory and Research, and is the author of Modern Leadership: Traditional Theories and New Approaches.

Richard Boyatzis, a professor at Case Western Reserve University and co-author of the bestselling book Primal Leadership, said the study represented an important step forward in understanding emotional intelligence and its role in the workplace and elsewhere.

"Emotional intelligence is a field of study characterized by contradicting claims, models and methods," said Boyatzis, who has been studying emotional intelligence (EI) since 1970. "But the meta-analysis by O'Boyle, Humphrey, Pollack, Hawver and Story lends light where there has been darkness. They took an impressively comprehensive view of EI and amassed a much larger collection of studies linking EI to intelligence, personality and job performance. This will be a source of inspiration to scholars and a guide for those lost in the confusing morass of claims, critiques and posturing."

The study's authors summarized all published research in the field of emotional intelligence and used the latest statistical analysis techniques to examine the accumulated data and to control for publication bias. The study explored the three prominent testing procedures of emotional intelligence and found that each reliably predicts job performance based on empirical data.

"Emotional intelligence has attracted considerable attention in business settings as well as in the community at large, but many academic scholars dispute the legitimacy of emotional intelligence, especially some of the more exaggerated claims made about it," said Neal Ashkanasy, professor of management at the University of Queensland and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

"By analyzing the numerous studies of emotional intelligence that have been conducted over the last decade, the authors of this article provide an evidence-based account of emotional intelligence, where it works and where it doesn't. And, most importantly, which of the various versions of emotional intelligence work the best. This will prove to be a valuable tool for academic researchers, as well as business consultants and managers."

Using EQ for Hiring Decisions

The cognitive skills and personality of a future employee are examined during a job interview: does the candidate have the right training? The right career history? Does he present himself well? And is he affable? However, qualifications and a nice character don't necessarily mean that the interviewee will be a good boss or a competent colleague, especially in professions where social interactions play a pivotal role. The individual's emotional intelligence has to be factored in, that is, his or her capacity to understand, regulate, recognise and manage emotions in the specific context of the work environment. Researchers at the Universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Berne (UNIBE), Switzerland, have devised an emotional intelligence test that measures emotional competences at work. Known as the Geneva Emotional Competence Test (GECO), it is now available for research purposes and commercial use -- and you can read all about the results in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

The importance of emotional intelligence is widely acknowledged today, whether it's about recognising and understanding emotions, regulating one's own feelings or managing those of others. But up to now there has never been a test for measuring these skills in the specific context of work and the standards that govern it, that was entirely based on scientific findings and empirically validated. "In fact, someone may behave in a totally different way with their family or at work. They might be authoritarian in one environment and submissive in another," points out Marcello Mortillaro, a researcher in UNIGE's Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (SCAS). "That's why we were so keen to develop an emotional intelligence test focusing exclusively on situations specific to the professional environment. The aim was to assess a person's level in this area and provide both individuals and organizations with a scientifically based description that could help in personal development, in hiring the right candidate for the job, and in giving the right job to the person."

The Geneva Emotional Competence Test

The Geneva Emotional Competence Test (GECO) consists of four tests for evaluating the different parts of emotional intelligence, namely: understanding emotions, recognising emotions, regulating one's own emotions and managing other people's emotions. Katja Schlegel, a researcher at UNIBE's Institute of Psychology, explains: "We concentrated on problematic situations that involve negative emotions: fear, sadness, anger and inappropriate happiness or Schadenfreude."

"The GECO results were controlled and validated by additional tests, and they are very convincing," continues Mortillaro. "The more emotional intelligence skills you have and the better those skills are, the better your work outcomes are, above and beyond your cognitive intelligence or personality." The researchers also found that a superior ability to regulate one's own emotions is linked to earning a slightly higher salary. In fact, emotional intelligence goes hand-in-hand with a higher degree of empathy, openness to others, respect for moral rules and, in overall terms, a positive temperament. "We tested GECO on people aged 20 to 60, and the results show that emotional intelligence increases with age and experience, meaning it's a faculty that can be improved and developed," says Mortillaro. Women on the whole obtain superior results than men, notably when asked to interpret nonverbal emotional expressions. "Emotional intelligence is also linked to a person's well-being and satisfaction with his or her lifestyle," adds Schlegel.

"We also noted that managers who perform well on GECO have better results in standardized leadership tasks and students with higher GECO scores get better grades," says Schlegel. This finding explains why GECO is now being marketed by a Bern-based company and is being used for recruitment and career guidance assessments. The test currently exists in French, English and German with an Italian version being developed. "We now want to analyse the data to see whether there are differences across different language regions. We're continuing to develop GECO so that it can support the role of emotional intelligence in recruitment and scientifically validate the predictive aspect of a person's abilities in their professional careers," says Mortillaro.

1000 people to validate GECO

The various questions included in GECO were drawn up using interviews with over 40 managers working in Swiss-based firms. Participants were asked to explain diverse situations where they were faced with fear, sadness, anger or inappropriate happiness. They then presented the answers specific to these situations, which were validated by emotion experts and other managers as well as representatives of the general public. More than 1000 individuals then completed the four tests that make up GECO.

During the first subtest, which focuses on understanding emotions, participants are presented with 20 emotional scenarios and are asked to choose from 15 possible options which emotion was probably experienced in each scenario. The second test, designed to assess the recognition of emotions, consists of 42 videos of a person expressing a particular emotion. Once more, participants had to select the right emotion from 14 suggestions. The third test was geared towards the ability to regulate emotions: 28 scenarios portrayed a particular situation, with participants having to choose how they would behave. There were four possible answers but subjects were only allowed to choose two, the objective being to reduce the negative emotion rather than maintain it. Finally, the fourth test evaluated the management of other people's emotions. As Mortillaro notes: "This was the most important and meaningful test, especially in a professional context." In each of 20 scenarios, a person expressed fear, sadness, anger or inappropriate happiness. Participants had to choose from five possible courses of action the one they thought most effective to manage the emotional state of the other person: cooperation, compromise, acceptance, avoidance or assertiveness. "In this instance, context is everything. You might think that cooperation is always the right solution but that's by no means the case," warns the UNIGE researcher.

In more than two decades of work as an executive coach, the majority of leaders who became derailed and didn't last long had clear EQ deficiencies, that couldn't compensate for the better technical skills they may have had.