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.