Affective and effective: Military job performance as a function of work‐related emotional intelligence (original) (raw)

2019, International Journal of Selection and Assessment

The idea of emotional intelligence (EI) has garnered attention in both the corporate world and in industrial-organizational psychology, partly through popularizing efforts. In this connection, Goleman (1998) claimed that an employee's social-emotional abilities, broadly considered, could be more important (twice as important?) than cognitive ability in determining whether that person succeeds or fails within the workplace. Companies, such as Google and L'Oreal have factored EI into their hiring processes, others, such as Johnson & Johnson have instituted relevant training programs, and scientists, too, have expressed enthusiasm for the EI construct (Abraham, 1999; Cherniss, 2000). Part of this interest converges with the long-standing belief that the problems of the workplace require practical rather than academic solutions (Sternberg & Wagner, 1993) and part of this interest follows from the observation that most organizational phenomena interact with emotional processes (Ashkanasy & Humphrey, 2011). Employees with higher levels of EI, for example, may be more capable of developing good working relationships, which should benefit both themselves and the organization as a whole (Lopes, Grewal, Kadis, Gall, & Salovey, 2006). This interface has been controversial, however. Critics have suggested that Goleman's (1998) definition of EI was too broad and that marketers and consultants have traded in anecdote and hype rather than scientific evidence (Zeidner, Matthews, & Roberts, 2004). Some of these critics, such as Landy, Locke, and Conte, have been as harsh concerning the EI construct as Goleman (1998) was in support of it and sorting through these debates was fairly nettlesome in the past (Daus & Ashkanasy, 2005). Fortunately, some degree of clarity has more recently emerged. A first point is that one should distinguish self-reports of EI from ability-based measurements because the two sorts of assessments do not correlate very highly with each other (Roberts, MacCann, Matthews, & Zeidner, 2010). A second point is that the most common ability-based measures of EI-such