Goleman (1999) - Emotional Intelligence - Paradigm building.pdf

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Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations EI and Paradigm Building 1
( www.eiconsortium.org )
Emotional Intelligence: Issues in Paradigm Building
From the book The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace
Edited by: Cary Cherniss and Daniel Goleman
Now Available through Amazon.com
CHAPTER TWO
By: Daniel Goleman
It was Super Bowl Sunday, that sacrosanct day when most American men are to
be found watching the biggest football game of the year. The flight from New York to
Detroit was delayed two hours in departing, and the tension among the passengers—
almost entirely businessmen—was palpable. As they finally arrived at Detroit, a
mysterious glitch with the boarding ramp made the plane stop some one hundred feet
from the gate. Frantic about arriving late, people on the plane leapt to their feet anyway.
One of the flight attendants went to the intercom. How could she most effectively
get all the passengers to comply with federal regulations requiring they all be seated
before the plane could finish taxiing to the gate?
She did not announce in a stern voice, “Federal regulations require that you be
seated before we can move to the gate.”
Instead, she warbled in a singsong tone, suggestive of a playful warning to an
adorable small child who has done something naughty but forgivable, “You’re
staaanding!”
At that, everyone laughed and sat back down until the plane had finished taxiing
to the gate. And given the circumstances, the passengers got off the plane in a
surprisingly good mood (Goleman, 1998b).
The flight attendant’s adept intervention speaks to the great divide in human
abilities that lies between the mind and heart, or more technically, between cognition and
emotion. Some abilities are purely cognitive, like IQ or technical expertise. Other
abilities integrate thought and feeling and fall within the domain of emotional
intelligence, a term that highlights the crucial role of emotion in their performance.
All emotional intelligence abilities involve some degree of skill in the affective
domain, along with skill in whatever cognitive elements are also at play in each ability.
This stands in sharp contrast to purely cognitive aspects of intelligence, which, to a large
degree, computers can be programmed to execute about as well as a person can: on that
Sunday flight a digitized voice could have announced, “Federal regulations require that
all passengers be seated before we proceed to the gate.” But although the basic content of
the digitized and “live” messages might have been the same, lacking the flight attendant’s
sense of timing, artful wit, and affect, the computerized version would have fallen flat.
People might have grudgingly complied with the firm directive but would have
undergone nothing like the positive mood shift the attendant accomplished. She was able
to hit exactly the right emotional note—something cognitive capabilities alone are
insufficient for, because by definition they lack the human flair for feelings.
Peter Salovey and John Mayer first proposed their theory of emotional
intelligence (EI) in 1990. Over the intervening decade, theorists have generated several
Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations EI and Paradigm Building 2
( www.eiconsortium.org )
distinctive EI models, including the elaborations by Salovey and Mayer on their own
theory. The theory as formulated by Salovey and Mayer (1990; Mayer, Salovey, &
Caruso, 2000) framed EI within a model of intelligence. Reuven Bar-On (1988) has
placed EI in the context of personality theory, specifically a model of well-being. My
own model formulates EI in terms of a theory of performance (Goleman, 1998b). As I
will show in this chapter and Chapter Three, an EI-based theory of performance has
direct applicability to the domain of work and organizational effectiveness, particularly in
predicting excellence in jobs of all kinds, from sales to leadership.
All these EI models, however, share a common core of basic concepts. Emotional
intelligence, at the most general level, refers to the abilities to recognize and regulate
emotions in ourselves and in others. This most parsimonious definition suggests four
major EI domains: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and
Relationship Management. (As theories develop, the terms they use develop too. As I
discuss in Chapter Three, these are the domain names in the most recent version of my
model. Some readers may be familiar with earlier versions of these names.)
These four domains are shared by all the main variations of EI theory, though the
terms used to refer to them differ. The domains of Self-Awareness and Self-Management,
for example, fall within what Gardner (1983) calls intrapersonal intelligence, and Social
Awareness and Relationship Management fit within his definition of interpersonal
intelligence. Some make a distinction between emotional intelligence and social
intelligence, seeing EI as personal self-management capabilities like impulse control and
social intelligence as relationship skills (see, for example, Bar-On, 2000a). The
movement in education that seeks to implement curricula that teach EI skills uses the
general term social and emotional learning, or SEL (Salovey & Sluyter, 1997).
The EI model seems to be emerging as an influential framework in psychology.
The span of psychological fields that are now informed by (and that inform) the EI model
ranges from neuroscience to health psychology. Among the areas with the strongest
connections to EI are developmental, educational, clinical and counseling, social, and
industrial and organizational psychology. Indeed, instructional segments on EI are now
routinely included in many college-level and graduate courses in these subjects.
One main reason for this penetration seems to be that the concept of emotional
intelligence offers a language and framework capable of integrating a wide range of
research findings in psychology. Beyond that, EI offers a positive model for psychology.
Like other positive models, it has implications for the ways we might tackle many
problems of our day — for prevention activities in physical and mental health care and for
effective interventions in schools and communities, businesses, and organizations
(Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Our increasing understanding of EI also suggests a
promising scientific agenda, one that goes beyond the borders of personality, IQ, and
academic achievement to study a broader spectrum of the psychological mechanisms that
allow individuals to flourish in their lives, their jobs, and their families and as citizens in
their communities.
In this chapter and the next I seek to explore the implications of the EI framework
for the workplace, and particularly for identifying the active ingredients in outstanding
performance, and to review the business case for the utility to an organization of
selecting, promoting, and training people for EI. Specifically, this chapter offers a brief
history of the EI concept and the increasing interest it is generating, discusses concerns
Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations EI and Paradigm Building 3
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about definitions and means of distinguishing EI abilities from other abilities, and
introduces some ideas and data for comparing EI and IQ as predictors of how well a
person will perform in a job.
The EI Paradigm Evolves
A paradigm, writes Thomas Kuhn, in his landmark work The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (1970), “is an object for further articulation and specification under
new or more stringent conditions” (p. 23). He adds that once a model or paradigm has
been articulated, the signs of scientific vigor include “the proliferation of competing
articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the
recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals” (p. 91). By Kuhn’s criteria, the
emotional intelligence paradigm shows signs of having reached a state of scientific
maturity.
It has taken decades to reach this point. In the field of psychology the roots of EI
theory go back at least to the beginnings of the intelligence testing movement. E. L.
Thorndike (1920), professor of educational psychology at Columbia University Teachers
College, was one of the first to identify the aspect of EI he called social intelligence. In
1920 he included it in the broad spectrum of capacities that individuals possess, their
“varying amounts of different intelligences.” Social intelligence, wrote Thorndike, is “the
ability to understand and manage men and women, boys and girls—to act wisely in
human relations” (p. 228). It is an ability that “shows itself abundantly in the nursery, on
the playground, in barracks and factories and salesrooms, but it eludes the formal
standardized conditions of the testing laboratory” (p. 231). Although Thorndike did once
propose a means of evaluating social intelligence in the laboratory—a simple process of
matching pictures of emotive faces with descriptions of emotions — he also maintained
that because social intelligence manifests in social interaction, “genuine situations with
real persons” would be necessary to accurately measure it.
In 1937, Robert Thorndike and Saul Stern reviewed the attempts to measure the
social intelligence E. L. Thorndike had discussed, identifying three different areas
“adjacent to social intelligence, perhaps related to it, and often confused with it” (p. 275).
The first area encompassed primarily an individual’s attitude toward society and its
various components: politics, economics, and values such as honesty. The second
involved social knowledge: being well versed in sports, contemporary issues, and general
“information about society.” This area seemed often conflated with the first. The third
form of social intelligence was an individual’s degree of social adjustment: introversion
and extroversion were measured by individuals’ responses to questionnaires (p. 276).
One widely known questionnaire of the time that Thorndike and Stern reviewed was the
George Washington Social Intelligence Test, developed in 1926. It measured, for
example, an individual’s judgment in social situations and in relationship problems;
recognition of the “mental state” of a speaker (measured through ability to match the
person’s words with the names of emotions), and ability to identify emotional expression
(measured through ability to match pictures of faces with the corresponding emotions).
But Thorndike and Stern concluded that the attempts to measure the “ability to
deal with people” had more or less failed: “It may be that social intelligence is a complex
of several different abilities, or a complex of an enormous number of specific social
habits and attitudes.” And they added, “We hope that further investigation, via situation
Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations EI and Paradigm Building 4
( www.eiconsortium.org )
tests, movies, etc., getting closer to the actual social reaction and further from words, may
throw more light on the nature of ability to manage and understand people” (p. 284).
The next half century of psychology, dominated as it was by the behaviorist
paradigm on one hand and the IQ testing movement on the other, turned its back on the
EI idea. Still, even David Wechsler (1952), as he continued to develop his widely used IQ
test, nodded to “affective capacities” as part of the human repertoire of capabilities.
Howard Gardner (1983) had a major hand in resurrecting EI theory in
psychology. His influential model of multiple intelligence includes two varieties of
personal intelligence, the interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences; EI, as mentioned
earlier, can be seen as elaborating on the role of emotion in these domains.
Reuven Bar-0n (1988) developed perhaps the first attempt to assess EI in terms of
a measure of well-being. In his doctoral dissertation he used the term emotional quotient
(“EQ”), long before it gained widespread popularity as a name for emotional intelligence
and before Salovey and Mayer had published their first model of emotional intelligence.
Bar-On (2000a) now defines EI in terms of an array of emotional and social knowledge
and abilities that influence our overall ability to effectively cope with environmental
demands. This array includes (1) the ability to be aware of, to understand, and to express
oneself; (2) the ability to be aware of, to understand, and to relate to others; (3) the ability
to deal with strong emotions and control one’s impulses; and (4) the ability to adapt to
change and to solve problems of a personal or a social nature. The five main domains in
his model are intrapersonal skills, interpersonal skills, adaptability, stress management,
and general mood (Bar-On, 1997b).
Finally, in 1990, Peter Salovey at Yale and his colleague John Mayer, now at the
University of New Hampshire, published the seminal article “Emotional Intelligence,”
the most influential statement of EI theory in its current form. Salovey and Mayer’s
original model (1990) identified emotional intelligence as the “ability to monitor one’s
own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this
information to guide one’s thinking and action” (p. 189). Citing a need to distinguish
emotional intelligence abilities from social traits or talents, Salovey and Mayer evolved a
model with a cognitive emphasis. It focused on specific mental aptitudes for recognizing
and marshalling emotions (for example, knowing what someone is feeling is a mental
aptitude, whereas being outgoing and warm is a behavior). A comprehensive EI model,
they argued, must include some measure of “thinking about feeling,” an aptitude lacked
by models that focus on simply perceiving and regulating feelings.
Their current model is decidedly cognitive in focus (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). In
this model, emotional intelligence comprises four tiers of abilities that range from basic
psychological processes to more complex processes integrating emotion and cognition. In
the first tier of this “mental ability model” is the complex of skills that allow an
individual to perceive, appraise, and express emotions. Abilities here include identifying
one’s own and other’s emotions, expressing one’s own emotions, and discriminating the
expressions of emotion in others. The second tier abilities involve using emotions to
facilitate and prioritize thinking: employing the emotions to aid in judgment, recognizing
that mood swings can lead to a consideration of alternative viewpoints, and
understanding that a shift in emotional state and perspective can encourage different
kinds of problem solving. In the third tier are skills such as labeling and distinguishing
between emotions (differentiating liking and loving, for instance), understanding
Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations EI and Paradigm Building 5
( www.eiconsortium.org )
complex mixtures of feelings (such as love and hate), and formulating rules about
feelings: for example, that anger often gives way to shame and that loss is usually
accompanied by sadness. The fourth tier of the model is the general ability to marshal the
emotions in support of some social goal. In this more complex level of emotional
intelligence are the skills that allow individuals to selectively engage in or detach from
emotions and to monitor and manage emotions in themselves and in others.
Salovey and Mayer’s 1997 model is developmental: the complexity of emotional
skill grows from the first tier to the fourth. However, all the mental aptitudes they
describe fit within the general matrix of self-other recognition or regulation.
The Increasing Interest in EI
My primary role as an EI theorist has been to propose a theory of performance
that builds on the basic EI model, adapting it to predict personal effectiveness at work
and in leadership (Goleman, 1998b). As I have done so, my role has also been that of a
synthesizer, bringing together a broad array of findings and theories in psychology and
integrating them into the emotional intelligence framework.
In my role as a science journalist, I have aimed to disseminate the EI concept,
primarily through my book Emotional Intelligence (Goleman, 1995a) but also through
other publications (for example, Goleman, 1998a, 1998b, 2000a, 2000b). The EI concept
has found remarkably receptive audiences throughout the world: the 1995 book has, at
this writing, been published in thirty-three foreign editions, is available in more than fifty
countries, and has more than five million copies in print worldwide. Howard Gardner
(1999) contends that Emotional Intelligence is now the most widely read social science
book in the world. Amazon.com now lists more than seventy titles on emotional
intelligence.
My 1998 follow-up book, Working with Emotional Intelligence, articulated my
EI-based theory of performance, made the business case for the importance of EI at work,
and set forth guidelines for effective individual development of the key EI-based
competencies. That book has also been widely published, as of this writing going into
print in twenty-nine foreign editions and becoming a best-selling business book in many
countries.
Although this wave of interest has, perhaps inevitably, given rise to many
questionable claims for EI—particularly in the business realm—that should not detract
from the solid science that supports EI or from its implications for psychology. As a
theoretical construct the EI model is very new. Yet in the last few years psychologists
have begun the process of establishing validity for measurement tools (Davies, Stankov,
& Roberts, 1998). There have been some detours in this process. One of the stranger ones
came when a group of Australian psychologists seized on an informational quiz I had
compiled in 1995, somewhat in the spirit of the satirical Journal of Irreproduceable
Results, for a popular magazine (Goleman, 1995b). Without contacting me, the
psychologists treated the quiz as though it were a serious measure (Davies et al., 1998).
They were apparently oblivious to my warning preceding the quiz that there were as yet
(in 1995) no well-validated paper-and-pencil assessments of EI. They also missed the
pointed humor in the quiz scoring key, which rated answers on a scale where the low end
was “Newt” and the high end “Gandhi.” And they earnestly reported that the quiz had
abysmal reliability and validity!

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