EI

Emotional Intelligence in the workplace…

Katherine Esparza

ENG315: Business & Professional Writing (BCK1046A)

Instructor:  Brendan Praniewicz

December 13, 2010

Emotional Intelligence in the work place

Whether a person is successful in the work place can have a huge impact on other aspects of life. Many factors drive success today. Emotions and feelings are at the core of almost everything we do.  Everything we do involves feelings.  Emotional intelligence is a form of intelligence that involves the ability to understand and pay attention to one’s own feelings and the feelings of’ others feelings including emotions, to discriminate among them and to the information to guide one’s thinking and actions. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the role that emotional intelligence plays in a person’s professional and personal success. With high emotional intelligence, success in all aspects of life is very possible.

Academic articles exploring the concept of emotional intelligence began to appear in the early 1990s. Little was known about the concept in the general public until it was popularized in 1995 by Daniel Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more the IQ. The book captured the attention of the general public, media, and researchers by claiming that emotional intelligence can be "as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ" in predicting how successful one is in life (Goleman 1995)

Preface
Currently emotional intelligence has created a lot of “buzz” in the workplace.  Employers are taking the emotional wellbeing of their staff very seriously. Companies today are raising the question of whether it is possible to improve the social and emotional competence of their employees. Social and emotional learning is different from cognitive and technical learning, and it requires a different approach to training and development.  This is new ground for several employers.

Developing an employee’s emotional intelligence had a direct impact on productivity, happiness and motivates the employee to do a great job.  This also helps to alleviate stress and encourages conflict resolution.

Bringing Emotional Intelligence to the Workplace
When the book, Emotional Intelligence, appeared in 1995, leaders agreed with the simple message that success is strongly influenced by a person’s qualities such as perseverance, self-control, and the technique of getting along with others. They could point to those who excelled in sales roles, those who had the unique ability to truly understand what the customer wanted which allowed for a trusting relationship with them. They were able to pick customer service employees that were able to calm an upset customer to calm and were able to be levelheaded about their problems; they could put their self in their customer’s shoes.

There was a question that was lingering. What about those workers who were not able to relate to others and did not understand emotional competencies. A member of leadership at a major insurance company was asked about the importance of emotional intelligence at work; enthusiastically he agreed that it was crucial to the customer service their customers received. However, when he was asked him how the company attempted to improve the emotional intelligence of employees, he said, "We provide information on how to treat each other. I feel that our employee’s emotional intelligence cannot be improved upon. Our employees are adults, and emotional intelligence has already been developed within them.”  

This is a different look on the topic. There are some who feel they can raise the emotional intelligence of a whole group of employees in a day or sometimes less. There are now workshops that advertised which have been designed to encourage employees to be emotionally competent and help to improve upon their social skills.

Research on emotional behavior suggests that it is possible to courage individuals of any age to become more emotionally intelligent in the workplace. I recently conducted a study which resulted in a number of important findings. My study confirmed that emotional intelligence was associated with work experience. Secondly, I discovered that there are sub factors of emotional intelligence are related to job performance.

One of the possible explanations of this finding could possibly be that employees with a satisfactory job performance have needed to develop emotional intelligence skills to a greater extent than those employees at the lower and higher ends of the spectrum. At the low end of job performance, employees may not have learned specific emotional intelligence skills such as self-control, which would have helped these workers, prioritize the time needed for their job as opposed to other activities. At the high end of job performance, employees may not have needed to develop specific emotional intelligence skills in order to reach a high level of job achievement. Instead, they may have relied solely on intellectual ability. This has implications for high job performers upon entering the workplace, in that they may not have developed the political and negotiating skills needed to flourish.

My findings showed that age was not related to emotional intelligence. The way I would explain for this finding is that perhaps life experience is more related to emotional intelligence.  In order examine the relationship between emotional intelligence and work experience, I would select a broader range of ages and years of work experience surveyed in future research.  Once appraising the results of the survey and I understood that expressing emotions accurately is a part of emotional intelligence, as defined by Salovey and Mayer (1990). Individuals who are more accurate can more quickly perceive and respond to their own emotions and better express those emotions to others. Such emotionally intelligent individuals can respond more appropriately to their own emotions because they can more accurately perceive them. (Lindebaum, 2010) These skills fall into the construct of emotional intelligence because of the cognitive processing of emotions that is involved. This is a learned emotion, it cannot be taught, but it can be enhanced (Shipley 2010).

Regardless of one’s position, emotional intelligence is a much needed skill which will lead to a lasting change.

Types of Learning.

Emotional incompetence due to experiences which occur early in life. These experiences are set in place as a normal part of living, as experience shapes the brain.  Emotional intelligence is a powerful predictor of future success, much more than IQ or SAT scores, because it is self taught. Scoring high in emotional intelligence has been proven to lead to success in various areas of an individual's life - more so than high scores on a spelling test or United States history test. Emotional intelligence, with its status as a self taught emotion, needs to be taught in schools.

Conclusion:

Emotional intelligence expands our vision of the workplace, making them more of a stress free zone.   Emotional intelligence is not touchy feely or fluffy, it an important skill set to develop.  We must step back for a moment, examine the environments that we walk into each and every day, and ask ourselves if we really are allowing ourselves to live a happy life.  The master ability is Emotional intelligence; it is self taught in the early stages of life and leads to success in all areas of life. These are fundamental lessons that have been ignored too long and must now be taught in the workplace.
 

References

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.

Lindebaum, D., & Cartwright, S.. (2010). A Critical Examination of the Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Transformational Leadership. The Journal of Management Studies, 47(7), 1317.  Retrieved December 8, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 2151525541).

Shipley, N., Jackson, M., & Segrest, S.. (2010). The effects of emotional intelligence, age, work experience, and academic performance. Research in Higher Education Journal, 9, 1-18.  Retrieved December 6, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 2174748071).

Salovey, P. and Mayer, J. "Emotional Intelligence", Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9, 3, pp. 185-211.

Sample consideration letter-

This is a "sample" letter requesting consideration for a postion.....

Dear Ms. Jones,

Please consider this letter to be my application for a position as a Human Resource Manager at Bloomingdale’s.  This June I will receive a bachelor of communication studies degree, from Ashford University.  I share a commitment expressed my Bloomingdale’s, I aim to exceed expectations.

My interest in working at Bloomingdale’s began the moment I entered your store in Chicago.  The store was amazing to say the least.  I would like the opportunity to contribute to the continuing success of Bloomingdale’s.

I believe that I have the skills to be part of the Bloomingdale’s team.  As I hope you will see on my resume, I help to ensure things are done right the first time. 

I will call next week to see if we can schedule an interview.  Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Katherine M. Esparza

Providing some family insight.....

The Personal side…

Katherine Esparza

COM360: Advanced COM360: Advanced Communications in Society (BCH1041A)

Instructor:  Justine Lemos

November 8, 2010

The Personal side

My father-in-law Felipe was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States when he was nineteen years old. He is a very proud man; his family means the world to him. There are so very man sides to Felipe in which I will share with you. He is a hard worker, a family man and like several Hispanics, he has diabetes.  The disease has taken a toll on Felipe in the recent years, a toll that is now affecting his family. He is a married father of three, in a single income household. From my perspective, he is a typical Mexican male. His view on healthcare would certainly be seen by some as strange or odd.  However, within his culture his belief is thought to be very normal. 

Diabetes in Hispanic Americans is a growing health challenge because of the increased prevalence of diabetes within this group, the greater number of risk factors for diabetes in Hispanics which includes an unhealthy diet, little exercise and poor awareness on the disease. Felipe explained that the thought of eating things that are nutritionally sound never play a part in what he does or does not eat. This helps to explain the growing number of Hispanics in the United States which are diagnosed with diabetes.  

The classification of Hispanic includes Mexican or Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American, South American, Spaniard, and other Hispanic. Diabetes is a group of diseases characterized by high levels of blood glucose (Lawrence 2009).  It results from defects in insulin secretion, insulin action, or both. Diabetes can lead to with serious complications and even premature death, people with diabetes can take measures to reduce the likelihood of this happening. 

All populations have risk factors for diabetes. Risk factors seem to be more common among Hispanics than non-Hispanic whites. When I asked Felipe his family history of diabetes he was unaware of their health history. These risk factors include a family history of diabetes, impaired glucose tolerance, hyperinsulinemia, insulin resistance, obesity, and physical inactivity (Zueling 2007).

There can be several complications from diabetes that affect Hispanic Americans.  Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes in older Hispanics. Type 2 diabetes develops when the body does not produce enough insulin or the insulin that is produced does not work properly. It can develop at any age, including during childhood, although it is usually diagnosed in people aged over 40 years. (O’Shea 2010.) This type of diabetes tends to run in families, but other factors add to the risk. Eye disease can lead to poor and even impaired vision and, ultimately, to blindness. Kidney disease can also be linked to diabetes.  Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure in the United States (Almendarez 2004). These are just a few of the examples of what can happen if someone who is affected by diabetes does not monitor the disease.  These are outcomes that I need to share with Felipe, for my own peace of mind and to help educate him.

I have also shared the fact that for Type 2 diabetes, the drug industry has now produced some two dozen types of medications, even as the disease has become about 50 percent more widespread in the United States than it was in 2001, with some 23.6 million diabetics, or nearly 8 percent of the population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Hurley 2010.)

Hispanic Americans are the second largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States (Lawrence 2009). Lawrence also states that by the year 2050, it is estimated that Hispanics will grown to 97 million and will make up 25 percent of the U.S. population.

  Felipe does not monitor his diabetes nor does he see a family doctor on a regular basis. In the Hispanic community and especially in the Mexican community, individuals may not seek professional help until they are very sick. Hispanic cultures view illnesses, treatments, and foods as having "hot" or "cold" properties. Some consider health as the product of balance among four body humors (blood and yellow bile are "hot"; phlegm and black bile are "cold"). One would balance a hot illness with cold medications and foods, etc. This might result in not following a doctor’s advice to drink lots of fluids for a common cold, if one believes drinks add more coldness to body. Instead, hot liquids (teas, soups, broth) could be recommended.

A few weekends ago I had the chance to sit down and visit with Felipe; I could tell that he was not looking the same.  In the three years that I have known him, his health has taken a toll on his appearance. He appears tired, quiet and sometimes even weak. I asked Felipe when he was going to the doctor.  He was very quick to explain that he would not be visiting the doctor anytime soon. I do have to admit that I was caught off guard. I am Caucasian, I grew up in a family where if you were sick or did not feel good, you went to the doctor. There was never a question as to if you do or do not go. May be there is a deeper issue with Felipe and his feelings on doctors.  It was not a topic I was going to push. I pointed out to Felipe that I would go with him to the doctor, I explained that I would even call and set the appointment and take a day off work.  He appreciated by kindness, however still declined.

Respect can be tested at times; it can be hard to stay quiet when the statics are astounding.  Mexican Americans are one of the fattest groups in what is one of the fattest nations on earth. Three out of four Mexican American adults (aged >20 years) were either overweight or obese at the end of the 20^th century (Flagal 2007). Obesity is just one of the major risk factors for type 2 diabetes. Many ethnic groups in the United States have high rates of obesity. Exercise in the Hispanic culture is not stressed to the younger generations. Felipe, my father-in-law is active, his job requires physical labor such has lifting and moving heavy materials.  However he does not participate and any sort of exercise outside of his job/work responsibilities.

“Más que comida, es vida provides new tools to Hispanics to prepare traditional foods in a more healthy way. A few simple adjustments can make these dishes healthier and lower in fat and calories,” said Betsy Rodríguez, public health advisor of the National Diabetes Education Program′s Hispanic/Latino Work Group (Zuellig).

 Más que comida, es vida features materials written in English and Spanish, including a recipe booklet called Ricas recetas para personas con diabetes y sus familiares that offers food ideas specifically designed for the Hispanic. Among the delicious and healthy recipes ola), beef or cow included in the booklet are: Spanish omelet (tortilla Espan), turkey stew (carne guisada de res o pavo), Caribbean o), two cheese pizza (pizza de dos quesos), and red snapper (pargo rojo cariben) and avocado tacos (tacos de aguacate)(Almendarez 2004). I shared this information with my father-in-law, he simply smiled.  He explained that he eats the foods that he grew up eating and he eats what he enjoys.  He does not plan on changing his diet.

 More programs along with raising awareness within the culture will not help to stop diabetes.  More needs to be done increase awareness to not only Hispanics, but the entire population. One cannot expect a culture to change overnight. Everything counts, that is what really needs to be stressed.  It will help those who are infected to understand ways to control diabetes and to live a happy fulfilling life.

               

References

Almendarez Isabel S, Michael Boysun, & Kathleen Clark. (2004). Thunder and Lightning and Rain: A Latino/Hispanic Diabetes Media Awareness Campaign. Family and Community Health, 27(2), 114-122.  Retrieved November 2, 2010, from Research Library. (Document ID: 595010611).

Flegal KM, Carroll MD, Ogden CL, Johnson CL. Prevalence and trends in obesity among US adults, 1999-2000. JAMA. 2002;288:1723–1727.

Hurley, Dan.  (2010, July 20). Steps Forward, and Backward, in Treating Diabetes :[Science Desk]. New York Times  (Late Edition (east Coast)),  p. D.5.  Retrieved November 7, 2010, from Banking Information Source.

Lawrence, J., Mayer,Davis, E., Reynolds, K., Beyer, J., Pettitt, D., D'Agostino, R., Marcovina, S., Imperatore, G., & Hamman, R.. (2009). Diabetes in Hispanic American Youth. Diabetes Care: Supplement 2: 2009 American Diabetes Association®, 32, S123-S132

O'Shea, L.. (2010). A practical guide to diagnosing type 2 diabetes. Practice Nurse, 39(11), 12-17.   

Zuellig, Alissa.  (2007, February). An Ounce of Prevention. Hispanic, 20(2), 30.  Retrieved October 13, 2010, from Research Library. (Document ID: 1209193571).