Panacea or Placebo? An Evaluation of the Value of Emotional Intelligence in Healthcare

Abstract

In this study we sought to identify desirable nursing behaviors (which we measured as organization citizenship - OCB) that are empirically linked to emotional intelligence (EI). A review of the literature reveals that EI is often considered the panacea of healthcare: yet some suggest caution in linking EI to a broad array of desirable outcomes. Our purpose in this study was to reduce the ambiguity surrounding the conflicting relationships between emotional intelligence and its consequences. We used a sample of clinical nurses, and Mayer and Salovey’s four-dimensional (perceiving, facilitating, understanding and managing emotions) EI model, and five dimensions of OCB to test the linkages. Our analysis revealed that aggregate OCB was robustly linked to understanding emotion. The EI dimension perceiving emotion was linked to conscientiousness, and facilitating emotion was linked to civic virtue. Managing emotion was linked to conscientiousness, civic virtue, altruism and courtesy. There was no relationship between emotional intelligence and sportsmanship. Our results suggest that efforts to increase emotional intelligence may result in increased conscientiousness in performing nursing duties and more involvement and participation in unit and hospital affairs. Increasing emotional intelligence may increase altruistic activities that help peers with work-related tasks, and increase discretionary coordinating efforts among nurses to prevent time waste and delays. However, there is no reason to expect that a poor unit or hospital work climate, and frustrated complaining behaviors will respond positively to increasing emotional intelligence. Nursing managers should realize that different behaviors have different linkages with emotional intelligence, and efforts to improve emotional intelligence may not provide global results.