CIPD - Emotional intelligence

Learning, training and development

Revised September 2008

This factsheet gives introductory guidance. It:

summarises the literature on emotional intelligence
looks at its potential value in the workplace
considers whether it can be learned
asks whether it is just another way of describing long-established competencies
includes the CIPD viewpoint.

What is emotional intelligence?

In a world of work where people are increasingly accepted to be the competitive edge, any idea that seems to offer the possibility of enabling them to work together more co-operatively and productively is likely to raise a great deal of interest. Such was the case when the concept of emotional intelligence first came to public prominence in 1995; subsequently, various commercial products became available almost overnight. But is emotional intelligence (also known as emotional intelligence quotient – EQ) a useful concept, or is it a fad that has been over-hyped by commercial interests?

Writers on emotional intelligence have based their approaches very much around competencies - for more on competencies, see our factsheet on competency.

View the factsheet on Competency and competency frameworks

The following summarises the work of three leading proponents, but several other writers have also contributed.

Mayer and Salovey

As a term, emotional intelligence made its first appearance in 1989 in an article by two American academic psychologists, John D Mayer and Peter Salovey. Based on earlier psychological works, some of which went back to the 1930s, the article defined emotional intelligence as ‘the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions’. The authors argued that emotional intelligence consisted of four separate elements (the Mayer-Salovey ability model):

Identifying emotions: the ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others, as well as in objects, art and events.
Using emotions: the ability to generate, use and feel emotion to communicate feelings, or employ them in thinking or creating.
Understanding emotions: the ability to understand emotional information, how emotions combine and progress, and to reason about such emotional meanings.
Managing emotions: the ability to regulate emotions in oneself and others so as to promote personal understanding and growth.

Daniel Goleman

But it was not until 1995 that emotional intelligence came to public attention as a result of a book by Daniel Goleman Emotional intelligence: why it can matter more than IQ¹. In his book, Goleman, a psychologist and journalist, summarised the work of Mayer, Salovey and others to make it accessible to a wider audience. The book became an instant best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and the emotional intelligence movement – some have described it as a bandwagon - took off.

Goleman himself, in association with the Hay Group, has developed the following model of competencies:

Personal competence: these competencies determine how we manage ourselves.
- Self-awareness: knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions.
- Emotional self-awareness: recognising one’s emotions and their effects.
- Accurate self-assessment: knowing one’s strengths and limits.
- Self-confidence: a strong sense of one’s self-worth and capabilities.
- Self-management: managing one’s internal states, impulses and resources.
- Self-control: keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check.
- Trustworthiness: maintaining standards of honesty and integrity.
- Conscientiousness: taking responsibility for personal performance.
- Adaptability: flexibility in handling change.
- Achievement-orientation: striving to improve or meeting a standard of excellence.
- Initiative: readiness to act on opportunities.
Social competence: these competencies determine how we handle relationships.
- Social awareness: awareness of others’ feelings, needs and concerns.
- Empathy: sensing others’ feelings and perspectives, and taking an active interest in their concerns.
- Organisational awareness: reading a group’s emotional currents and power relationships.
- Service orientation: anticipating, recognising and meeting customers’ needs.
- Social skills: adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others.
- Developing others: sensing others’ developmental needs and bolstering their abilities.
- Leadership: inspiring and guiding individuals and groups
- Influence: wielding effective tactics for persuasion.
- Communication: listening openly and sending convincing messages.
- Change catalyst: initiating or managing change.
- Conflict management: negotiating and resolving disagreements.
- Building bonds: nurturing instrumental relationships.
- Teamwork and collaboration: working with others toward shared goals. Creating group synergy in pursuing collective goals.

Higgs and Dulewicz

These two British authors from Henley Management College identified seven elements of emotional intelligence in their book Making sense of emotional intelligence². These elements are broken down into the following three areas:

Drivers: motivation and decisiveness, traits that energise people and drive them towards achieving goals.
Constrainers: conscientiousness, integrity and emotional resilience, factors that control and curb the excesses of the drivers.
Enablers: sensitivity, influence and self-awareness, traits that facilitate performance and help individuals to succeed.

Summary

Other writers and consultants have come up with different models.
To attempt a summary of all the writing, while intelligence quotient (IQ) purely measures cognitive capacity, emotional intelligence is argued to involve emotional centres based in a different part of the brain working in harmony with the intellectual centres. People with good levels of emotional intelligence are said to be more able to manage and harness their emotions. They are also better able to understand other people’s emotions, to communicate with them, relate to them and influence them.

Emotional intelligence in the workplace

Supporters of the concept claim that emotionally intelligent managers are (for example) better at resolving workplace conflict and are better negotiators and better leaders. Thus Goleman argues that most managers with MBAs have similar IQs (because to gain an MBA demands a certain level of intelligence), but the distinguishing feature of good managers among MBA-holders is higher levels of emotional intelligence. Mayer, however, has said that in his view not every manger needs to have emotional intelligence, though managers should be aware of it in others and value it. To some extent, this may be a fruitless debate: in the same way that some people have higher IQs than others, there is a continuum of emotional intelligence. Virtually everyone will have some degree of emotional intelligence, and the question may then become how it can be developed and harnessed (see below).

All writers agree that emotional intelligence is not a substitute for IQ and technical and professional abilities. Managers need to be professionally competent first.

Does emotional intelligence improve job performance?

What evidence is there that emotional intelligence enhances job performance? Its proponents have carried out research which claims to show linkages. There are examples from different cultures:

‘A very clear relationship’ between a competency-based measures of emotional intelligence and British managers’ career advancement over a seven-year period².
American financial advisers who went through an emotional competence development programme had sales gains of 8% - 20%, significantly more than those who did not undergo the programme³.
Ten emotional competencies emerged as the distinguishing capabilities of successful teams in a German chemical company³.

Emotional intelligence is also said to be an effective way of identifying leadership potential, because the qualities that constitute good leadership such as decisiveness, empowering others and openness to change all reflect aspects of emotional intelligence - for more on leaders’ qualities, see our factsheet on leadership.

View the factsheet on Leadership

Similarly, research suggests that one important element in teamwork is emotional intelligence, because team success depends not so much on intellect as on the quality of interaction between team members – for more on teams, see our factsheet on working in teams.

View the factsheet on Teamworking

Can emotional intelligence be learned?

Goleman argues that trying to teach emotional competencies via the traditional course is wrong. Long-established training methods are based on cognitive learning, which draws on different areas of the brain from emotional learning; emotional learning involves ways of thinking and acting that are more central to a person’s identity. Moreover, people are more likely to resist being told that they need learn how (for example) to control their temper or improve their interpersonal skills than they are to being told that they need to improve their technical skills. Developing emotional intelligence brings additional brain circuitry into play – in effect this circuitry needs to be re-tuned, which takes time.

It can, says Goleman, take at least two months to unlearn old behaviours and replace them with new ones. Away from the workplace, the Goleman approach is to follow up 360-degree feedback (which identifies their levels of emotional intelligence) by encouraging people to produce action plans. Back at work, they are encouraged to practice the new behaviour immediately, with support from a mentor or immediate manager.

Higgs and Dulewicz argue that their components of emotional intelligence divide into two categories. The first category is those that people can clearly learn through established learning methods, such as personal development strategies like sensitivity, influence and self-awareness. The second category relates to the more enduring elements of an individual’s personality that are more difficult to learn, like motivation, emotional resilience and conscientiousness. For this category, the development approach should consist of training strategies that exploit each individual’s characteristics to the full and on developing 'coping strategies' that minimise the impact of potential limitations.

Other organisations and individuals have drawn up different approaches, but the two mentioned above illustrate that that there is no single agreed way of developing emotional intelligence.

Is emotional intelligence just another way of describing long-established competencies?

Goleman has claimed that approximately 90% of star performers’ success in leadership is attributable to emotional intelligence. However, others are more sceptical. Woodruffe4 says that this ‘seems absurd…it is misleading to equate EI with the proportion of performance it accounts for – that depends on the relative importance of the particular [Goleman’s emotional intelligence] competencies to performance’.

In the same article, Woodruffe argues (among other things) that:

Emotional behavioural competencies are not new – it has been clear for some time that success depends on interpersonal skills as well as cognitive abilities.
Goleman’s descriptions of the five qualities of emotional intelligence often seem indistinguishable from the competencies they are meant to cause. Is there any real difference, Woodruff asks, between the behaviour ‘accurate self-assessment’ and the quality ‘self-awareness’, or between the behaviour ‘self-control’ and the quality ‘self-regulation’?
The qualities of emotional intelligence do not have new elements. All that the emotional intelligence movement has done is to popularise what was already known.
Tests of emotional intelligence rely on self-assessment and as such are inherently unreliable. (Mayer also dislikes the use of self-report questionnaires because people are ‘horrible judges’ of their own emotional intelligence. Even 360-degree assessments, recommended by Goleman and by Higgs and Dulewicz, are unreliable because other people are not very good judges of others’ emotional intelligence5. Mayer and others have developed a different test consisting of a series of practical ability tests.)

Woodruffe thus concludes that emotional intelligence ‘is simply old wine in new bottles’, and that its significance has been exaggerated. Others might be tempted to say that emotional intelligence is simply a different way of describing attributes which have always been recognised as valuable in managers and leaders: maturity, commonsense and empathy.

CIPD viewpoint

Arguably, the concept of emotional intelligence is useful because it draws attention to the following in particular:

There are aspects of management, leadership and teamwork in which competencies owing their origin to emotional states are at least as important as technical abilities.
Managing personal emotions and adapting them to circumstances, and understanding others’ emotions, is an important aspect of leadership and teamwork.

CIPD research (summarised in our factsheet on line managers’ role in HR) has shown that managers with better people skills in the areas of, for example, communications, responsiveness, coaching and guidance, get better performance from the people they manage.

View the factsheet The role of front line managers in HR

However, the hype surrounding emotional intelligence – indeed, the very phrase ‘emotional intelligence’ - might mean that sceptical line managers could be tempted to dismiss it as ‘just another HR fad’.

Certainly, those considering the introduction of programmes of emotional intelligence need to manage the process with care. In particular they should:

be aware that there are different models of emotional intelligence
understand that emotional intelligence is not a substitute for technical competence
appreciate that there are various methods of attempting to develop emotional intelligence
be sceptical of some of the more inflated claims made for certain emotional intelligence products and techniques
carefully consider the different ‘offers’ on the market before buying into particular programmes or approaches.

References

GOLEMAN, D. (1996) Emotional intelligence: why it can matter more than IQ. Bloomsbury: London.
HIGGS, M. and DULEWICZ, V. (1999) Making sense of emotional intelligence. Windsor: NFER-Nelson.
GOLEMAN, D. (1999) Working with emotional intelligence. Bloomsbury: London.
WOODRUFFE, C. (2001) Promotional intelligence. People Management. Vol 7, No 1, 11 January. Pp26-29.
Quoted in PICKARD, J. (1999) Sense and sensitivity. People Management. Vol 5, No 1, 28 October. pp 48-50, 53, 55-56.

Emotional intelligence