Abstract
Emotional intelligence (EI) has become a buzz-word over the past ten years, yet misconceptions with regard to the concept abound. This leads to confusion among the general public, the scientific community, as well as to unfounded claims being made as to what the development of EI can accomplish in a person’s life. In this article the aim is to clarify the concept EI by making a sharper demarcation between the Emotional Life Dimension and the other life dimensions. Based on this clarification, the conceptualisation of EI in the literature is reviewed in more depth.
Highlights
Emotional intelligence has become a buzz-word and part of informed people’s vocabulary over the past ten years
In their article “Emotional Intelligence: Issues and Common Misunderstandings”, Emmerling and Goleman (2003, p. 9) point out that, while some might argue that the goal of research should be to identify and define a singular theoretical framework to be labelled as the “correct” version of emotional intelligence (EI), another approach would be to acknowledge that having multiple theories can often serve to elucidate additional aspects of complex psychological constructs
A review of claims made by EI practitioners indicated that many of the traits and competencies attributed to the development of EI should, rather be attributed to the development of spiritual leadership, as these traits involve the spiritual dimension and not the emotional dimension. l These misconceptions can partly be ascribed to the lack of a single, universally accepted definition of EI
Summary
Emotional intelligence has become a buzz-word and part of informed people’s vocabulary over the past ten years. Theories of EI, upon which definitions of EI are based, are often classified into two basic types: those proposing a narrow definition of EI as an ability, based on the definition of Mayer et al (1999), and those utilising a broader definition of EI, of which Goleman’s approach is the most well-known (Zeidner, Matthews, Roberts, & MacCann, 2003) These two approaches are called “academic” versus “popular” (Emotional Intelligence View 360, 2004), or “ability” versus “mixed-model” (Mayer et al, 1999). 2) comes up with an valid statement when he comments on Emmerling and Goleman’s article He writes: If we, as researchers or practitioners, don’t have a common language we cannot hope to effectively communicate with each other. One has to agree with Caruso’s statement (2004, p. 4) that there have been too many wild claims made in a frenzy to stake out territory during the gold rush of emotional intelligence
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