Abstract
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is now widely used in organizations and graduate schools with an increase in published research supporting it. Discussion about EI whether based on measures or theory has given little distinction as to behavioral EI (i.e., how does EI appear in a person’s actions). This results in spurious conflicts about the validity of the different theories or measures which likely limit predicting managerial and leadership effectiveness, engagement, innovation and organizational citizenship. By adding a behavioral level, the concept of EI could relate to work and life outcomes beyond general mental ability and personality traits, avoid some of the criticisms while providing a more holistic theory of EI. As such, EI exists within personality as a performance trait or ability, and a self-schema self-image and trait, and a set of behaviors (i.e., competencies). The main contribution of this establishing the behavioral EI with a multi-level theory, while explaining how to assess it, the benefits of such a concept and its psychometric validity and challenges. The history and assortment of validation studies will illustrate that measures can rigorously and effectively assess the behavioral level of EI.
Highlights
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is widely used in organizations and graduate schools with an increase in published research supporting it
The contributions of this paper are: (1) articulating that there is a behavioral level within the structure of EI; (2) review the history and an assortment of validation studies of behavioral EI that illustrate that measures can effectively assess the behavioral level of EI; and (3) highlighting the behavioral level within a multi-level theory of EI
In a study of executives in a major US bank, Hopkins and Bilimoria (2008) showed that among 105 executives, behavioral EI distinguished the more successful in terms of performance ratings. They showed that there were no significant differences in the behavioral EI shown among the male and female executives, gender did moderate the effect of using the behavioral EI on success
Summary
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is widely used in organizations and graduate schools with an increase in published research supporting it. The behavioral approach to EI emerged from two research streams: (1) inductive analysis of criterion-referenced, critical incident interviews against performance; and (2) assessment center coding of simulations. The inductive analysis would begin with identifying outstanding or exceptionally effective people in a specific job and those who were “average” or typical Using these criterion for sample identification is called an extreme case research design (Boyatzis, 1998). The critical incident interview, called the behavioral event interview or behavioral interviewing was an attempt to reconstruct what occurred in specific work situations (Flanagan, 1954; Boyatzis, 1982; Spencer and Spencer, 1993) In this interview protocol, a person was asked, “Tell me about a time you felt effective as a [title of the job being examined].”. Assessing a 47 managers from various companies in Europe, and 15 knowledge works from those same firms, Ryan et al (2009) reported that 11 of the 13 and 11 of the 12 competencies distinguishing effective performance were behavioral EI, in the two samples respectively
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