Emotional Intelligence EI: Definitions, explanations and measurements'

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Emotional Intelligence (EI) Definitions,
explanations and measurements.

• Dr Daniel Farrelly
• Lecturer in Psychology

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What is Emotional Intelligence?

• Relatively new area, first published research in
  1990s
• Popularised by Goleman (1995) in his book
  Emotional Intelligence Why It Can Matter More
  Than IQ
• Since then, EI has become a major area of
  research in psychology
• 1997 7 articles
• 2002 46 articles
• 2007 71 articles
• Now EI an established domain in personality,
  intelligence and social psychology

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Definitions

• abilities such as being able to motivate
  oneself and persist in the face of frustrations
  to control impulse and delay gratification to
  regulate one's moods and keep distress from
  swamping the ability to think to empathize and
  to hope." (Goleman, 1995)
• an array of non-cognitive capabilities,
  competencies, and skills that influence ones
  ability to succeed in coping with environmental
  demands and pressures (Bar-On, 1997)
• an ability to recognise the meanings of
  emotions and their relationships, and to reason
  and problem-solve on the basis of them. Emotional
  intelligence is involved in the capacity to
  perceive emotions, assimilate emotion-related
  feelings, understand the information of those
  emotions and manage them (Mayer, Caruso and
  Salovey, 1999)

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Components

• Reading the emotions of others
• How would you deal with the emotions of these
  individuals?

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Components

• Awareness of ones own emotions
• Anger at inanimate objects (e.g. computers) that
  dont work correctly
• Sadness at particular times of the week, or of
  the day (e.g. Sunday evening)
• Fear when walking past certain groups of
  individuals on a street
• Need to be aware of these to deal with them
  effectively

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Components

• Regulating emotions
• Helps an individual to deal with stress etc
• Involves effective strategies for building
  positive moods
• A valuable skill in all facets of life

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Components

• Using emotions for goal-oriented tasks
• A boxer may use anger to beat an opponent
• A surgeon may use calmness and relaxation to
  perform tricky operations
• A call-centre employee may use happiness to gain
  new customers or satisfy existing ones
• Requires an acknowledgement of the emotion
  needed, and evoking it in any way

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High EI Björn Borg?
http//jp.youtube.com/watch?vi6TzTdoucBo
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Measuring EI

• Individual differences perspective Everyone in
  a population will vary in levels of EI
• EI is somewhat subjective (compare with IQ),
  therefore it is difficult to measure
• Two measurement methods used
• Performance/ability EI
• Trait/self-report EI

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Ability EI

• Based on intelligence testing model
• Ability EI tests utilise emotion-related tasks
• e.g. What action would you take to make yourself
  feel better after a disappointment over promotion
  at work?
• A main example of this test is the MSCEIT
• Involves consensus scoring (i.e. What proportion
  of people agree with your response?)
• Difficult to establish what are unambiguously
  right answers

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Self-report EI

• Based on personality assessment model
• A main example is the Bar-On EQ-iS
• Questions ask how much individual agrees or
  disagrees with a comment
• I am aware of the non-verbal messages sent by
  others.
• Involves questions that will be either positively
  or negatively scored
• Problem with social desirability bias

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Correlates of EI

• Is EI an intelligence?
• Ability EI generally linked to intelligence tests
• Ability EI (MSCEIT) is linked to crystallised
  intelligence rather than fluid intelligence
  (Farrelly Austin, 2007)
• Some evidence of links between academic success
  and positive health behaviours (e.g. exercise)
• Strong overlaps with other personality measures
  (e.g. conscientiousness, openness)
• A dark side? EI not linked to emotional
  manipulation or Machiavellianism (Austin,
  Farrelly, Black Moore, 2007)

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Conclusion

• Rapidly growing area of research, with great
  interest among general public
• Still problematic difficult to measure,
  overlaps with other personality measures
• Significant implications to a number of fields
  especially the workplace

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Applying EI in the workplace

• Kevin Paton
• Principal Lecturer in Psychology

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EI and the workplace

• Recruitment
• Training and development
• Communications, cooperation and relationships
• Emotional labour

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Recruitment

• Is EI something that employers (should) look for?
  
• How is it assessed in recruitment activities? And
  at what stage? Implicitly or explicitly?
• Importance of EI varies between different
  businesses and different job roles
• Awareness of EI vital for entire recruitment
  process

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Recruitment

• Explicit testing of EI can give an accurate
  measure
• However can be problematic (e.g. Social
  desirability bias) better to test ability EI
• EI measures specific to workplace (e.g. WEIP 3)
  may be more suitable but cost/time?
• Implicit measures may be inaccurate or biased
  Requires recruiters to have high EI

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Training and Development

• Important area for EI awareness in the workplace
• Can be directed to all levels within the
  workforce (depending on the company)
• Varying degrees, from discussion of awareness to
  explicit training using diagnostic tools (e.g.
  WEIP 3)
• Needs to be based on accurate scientific
  research, not just popularisations

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Training and Development

• Can EI be learnt? An important and complicated
  question!
• Many consultants provide EI training but
  empirical evidence that EI can be developed is
  limited. Study by Wong, Foo, Wang and Wong (2007)
  suggests EI can be developed through training if
  EI is an ability.
• However, EI training will certainly increase
  awareness within the work environment
• Also encourage employees to maximise their EI
  abilities when necessary

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Communications, Cooperation and Relationships

• Where EI training can be implemented
• Very important for job satisfaction as well as
  successful performance
• EI becoming more important as businesses become
  more global
• Vital communication has to be conducted over
  distances
• Identify when and who would benefit from EI
  training
• e.g. Managers who need to develop people skills
• Employees feeling dissatisfied or disillusioned
  with company communications
• Projects involving extensive teamwork

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E-mail communications

• Relatively new but extensive communication
• Artificial humans evolved to communicate
  face-to-face, making use of facial expressions,
  tone of voice
• Leads to problems with e-mails everyone can
  think of an example!
• Awareness of EI can facilitate communications
• Appreciation of the current emotions of recipient
• Awareness of own emotions when writing e-mail
• Expressing these emotions (or not!) clearly
• Aware of how message may affect recipients
  emotions (intentionally or unintentionally)

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Emotional Labour

• Its possible that EI will be particularly
  important for certain kinds of job role and
  certain kinds of organisation.
• These are Emotional Labour jobs and
  organisations.
• In Emotional Labour, EI may be one the most
  important characteristics for successful
  performance.

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Emotional Labour

• What is Emotional Labour ?
• the process of regulating both feelings and
  expressions for organisational goals. (Grandey,
  2000).
• Concept developed by Hochschild (1983) on the
  basis of research into service sector
  organisations. Hochschild identified that certain
  types of jobs required considerable effort by
  employees in the management of their emotions in
  work in effect a 3rd type of labour is
  becoming more important in the world of work.
• Basic issue the nature of EL jobs requires
  workers to carefully control their emotional
  expression despite being exposed to highly
  emotional situations on occasions.

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Emotional Labour

• What are typical emotional labour job roles?
• Call centre customer service workers
• Airline flight attendants
• Food service workers
• Nursing staff
• Managers of NUFC ?
• Any job role where there are constraints on the
  expression of emotion but where people are likely
  to encounter emotionally charged encounters
  with other people.

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Emotional Labour

• Research suggests that EL has major implications
  for workers mental health and well being EL
  can lead to stress, burnout and feelings of
  personal inauthenticity.
• Proposed by some (e,g. Giardini and Frese, 2006)
  that emotional competence or EI may be an
  important mediator on the effects of EL. i.e. a
  high level of EI may help employees cope with the
  demands of emotional labour.
• Significance Emotional Intelligence may be a
  critically important attribute in emotional
  labour job roles.
• Current research project by Samia Malik of
  Department of Psychology is investigating whether
  EI helps restaurant staff to cope with the
  demands of their jobs.

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Conclusion

• EI can impact on all areas of the workings of a
  business
• Through recruitment and training, businesses can
  use EI awareness to improve performance
• However, must exercise caution and have realistic
  aims with regards to EI in the workplace dont
  overestimate its abilities!
• Vital that EI awareness for businesses is done
  seriously and thoroughly Rigorous, contemporary
  research and not lightweight, popular views of EI!

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Emotional intelligence and the Workplace

• Dr Lynne Humphries
• Senior Lecturer in Computing

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Emotional Intelligence and employees

• Many studies concentrate on senior managers and
  not those at more junior levels.
• The ability to manage up as well as down gains
  importance as a person progresses through his/her
  career.
• Understanding the boss is as important a skill as
  developing new technical skills

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Training in EI at HE level

• Humphries, L.P. (2007) Developing emotional
  intelligence in tomorrows managers a case study
  in hybrid learning at H.E. level. Education,
  Training and Life Long Learning for IT
  Professionals,
• Edited by Arthur Tatnall, J. Barrie Thompson, and
  Helen M. Edwards. Published by International
  Federation for Information Processing, Production
  and Printing by Heidelberg Press, Melbourne,
  Australia.

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EI and openness to differences and happiness

• Chamorro et. al. (2006) also found that EI is a
  strong predictor of happiness.
• Wells (2004) found a relationship between EI and
  openness to differences.

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EI and life satisfaction

• This relationship with life satisfaction was
  endorsed by Bastian and Nettlebeck (2005) who
  found no statistical significant relationship
  between EI and academic achievement
• EI is related to non-personality criteria such as
  life satisfaction and relationship quality and
  women scored higher than men on EI scores.

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Trust

• For colleagues to share knowledge and engage in
  informal learning/ teaching there needs to be an
  element of trust.
• Reizi (2007) found that trust in management
  increases knowledge sharing through the reduction
  of fear of losing ones unique value.

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Knowledge sharing within an organisation

• The implications for managers is that creating a
  trustworthy environment by creating an atmosphere
  of openness, commitment to education and training
  and demonstrating leadership will lead to more
  knowledge sharing within the organization.

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Innovation and creativity

• In complex systems leaders enable the future
  rather than control it (Plowman et.al., 2007).
• They found that as enablers, leaders disrupt
  existing patterns of behaviour and encourage
  novelty.
• These effective leaders also make sense of
  emerging events for others.
• Most of the literature highlights positive
  activities associated with EI.

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Emotional competencies and business success a
case study

• Cherniss (1999) in a paper on the business case
  for EI cites a case study in Tandam Computers
• A star performer describes how several
  emotional competencies were critical to his
  success.
• He had to convince Tandams managers (using
  influence) that the trend was away from Mainframe
  computers to networks of linked computers.

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Bottom up emotional management

• He developed the system using new technology
  (showing leadership and change catalyst).
• Then he spent four years showing the system to
  customers and company sales personnel before the
  new network applications were accepted.
• This latter activity showed self-confidence,
  self-control and achievement drive.

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EI Traits/Workplace activity interaction
diagram.
The shaded areas demonstrate the workplace
experiences of employees with managers/ leaders
who exhibit high or low levels of emotional
intelligence (EI).
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Using your feelings to help make decisions

• A new manager has joined your department and is
  the only new recruit for several years. There is
  some resentment because one of the incumbent
  staff did not get the promotion. The new manager
  is confident and charismatic, is very energetic
  and has come in full of new ideas. You feel that
  she lacks attention to detail and has a different
  style to the last manager (who retired).
• Question 1
• If the new manager has high EI what strategies
  would she use to get everybody on board?
• Question 2
• How would you use EI skills to help your working
  relationship with the new boss?