Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence is one of the recent developments and is gaining a lot of importance.

Emotional Intelligence is often referred to as Emotional Quotient (EQ) and today Project managers have recognized their need to have EQ for successful people management.

Emotional intelligence deals with bringing compassion, harmony and humanity to work and measurement of people capability. EQ principles provide a new way to understand and assess people's behaviours, management styles, attitudes, interpersonal skills, and potential. Emotional Intelligence is an important consideration in human resources planning, job profiling, recruitment interviewing and selection, management development, customer relations and customer service, and more. EQ is the ability to manage feelings and handle stress. EQ has as much to do with knowing when and how to express emotion as it does with controlling it.

EQ has two aspects of intelligence:

• Understanding oneself - goals, intentions, responses, behaviour etc
• Understanding others, and their feelings.

EQ has five domains–

• Knowing one’s own emotions,
• Managing the emotions,
• Self Motivation,
• Regonizing and understanding other’s emotions
• Managing the emotions of others.

First three domains deal with self and last two with others emotions.

EQ Assessment tools:

Currently there are three prevailing approaches:

1. Psychologist Bar-On uses EQ (Emotional Quotient): This is one of the oldest tool, which was originally developed for clinical purposes. This is more of a predictive tool and was designed to assess those personal qualities that enabled some people to possess better emotional well-being than others. The Bar-On EQ-i consists of 133 items. It gives an overall EQ score as well as scores for the following 5 composite scales and 15 sub-scales:

a. General Mood Scales: Optimism, Happiness.

b. Interpersonal Scales: Empathy, Social Responsibility, Interpersonal Relationship.

c. Intrapersonal Scales: Self-Regard Emotional Self Awareness, Assertiveness, Independence, Self-actualization.

d. Adaptability Scales: Reality Testing, Flexibility, Problem Solving.

e. Stress Management Scales: Stress Tolerance, Impulse Control.

2. Multifactor Emotional Intelligence (Mayer, Caruso, & Salovey): This is more of a test rather than self-report measure. Here, the test-taker performs a series of tasks that are designed to assess the person’s ability to perceive, identify, understand, and work with emotions.

a. Perceiving Emotions: Ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others, as well as in objects, music, art, stories and other stimuli.

b. Understanding Emotions: Ability to understand emotional information, how emotions combine and progress through emotional transitions, and to appreciate such emotional meanings.

c. Managing Emotions: Ability to be open to feelings, and to modulate them in oneself and others so as to promote personal understanding and growth.

d. Facilitating Thought: Ability to generate, use, and feel emotion as necessary to communicate feelings, or employ them in cognitive processes.

Emotional Competency Inventory: ECI is a 360 degree instrument. People who know the individual rate him or her on 20 competencies. Developed by Richard Boyatzis and Daniel Goleman, this measure is designed to assess competencies from four quadrants.

a. Self-Awareness: includes emotional self-awareness, Accurate self-assessment, Self-confidence.

b. Self-Management: includes Self-control, Adaptability, Conscientiousness Trustworthiness, Initiative, and Achievement Orientation.

c. Social Awareness: includes Empathy, Service orientation, and Organizational awareness.

d. Social Skills: includes Leadership, Influence, Developing others, Change catalyst, Communication, Conflict management, Building bonds, Teamwork & Collaboration

Another measure that has been promoted commercially is the EQ Map, which is the ability to read maps.

Yet another measure which is not very popular was developed by Schutte and team. They developed a 33-item self-report measure based on Salovey and Mayers (1990) early work. There is evidence for convergent and divergent validity.

Since EQ comprises a large set of abilities another way to measure emotional intelligence or competence is by testing specific abilities.