Emotional Intelligence and Organizational Performance

I. What is EI?

A. EI can be divided into two dominant schools of thought.

1. "Purist" position by Mayer and Salovey consider EI an ability similar to spatial or verbal skills.

a. It's the ability to perceive emotions, to access emotions to assist thought, understand emotions and emotional knowledge and reflectively regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

2. "Mixed" model by Bar-On and Coleman combines emotional processing with personality aspects such as optimism and persistence.

II. Connection between EQ and IQ

A. EI meets traditional standards for intelligence: It can be broken into set of mental abilities; the abilities are inter-correlated, they correlate positively with traditional intelligence; they develop with age and experience.

B. EI leads to the ability to regulate one's feelings, and the concept is two-sided: One side involves the intellect understanding emotions the other side involves emotion reaching into the intellect system and generating creative ideas.

C. EI is a skill that needs to be facilitated