Emotional Intelligence

Introduction

In the modern world, many of us find it increasingly difficult to interact both with ourselves and others. An important factor in our ability to successfully connect is emotional intelligence. When it comes to happiness and success in our relationships, career and personal goals, Emotional Intelligence (EI) plays a more essential role rather than intellectual ability (IQ). We need emotional intelligence to act intention into action, in order to make suitable decisions about the things that matter most to us, and to interact with others in effective ways.

This essay addresses emotional Intelligence in an organisational management context. However, emotional Intelligence is a broad and extended concept which has not been applied in enterprise widely. This allows deeper discussion and a more thorough evaluation of whether theory in this area has helped with the successfully management of people at work. The essay begins with discussion of emotional Intelligence, including definitions of terms. This is followed by a review of current literature. From this an explanation is made about the significance and usage of emotional Intelligence within organisations.  Finally, conclusions are made about the necessity of emotional Intelligence and the successful management of people at work.

Literature review

"Emotional intelligence" is the concept which was put forward by United States psychologist Peter Salovey and John Mayer when they aim to study in IQ defects. In their view, in addition to people's intelligence quotient, there is also another essential element of life science -- emotional intelligence quotient (referred to as EQ). Emotional intelligence is a reflection of a person controlling their emotions and the ability to withstand external pressures as well as control of own balance. (Salovey & Mayer, 1990) Experiments show that EQ is playing more important role than IQ for persons and organizations in determining a person's life, career, and an organization's viability and success. More and more organizations recognize that high performance is not necessarily from skills outstanding people, and also is not necessarily high-IQ people, but people who are good at dealing with the relationship between themselves and others. (Hackman, J.R., 1990) In this case, EQ training of employees is respected by more and more companies, such as the widely used new recruitment standards based on the competency model, covering the content of EQ. Along with the deepening of the research on EQ, EQ concept extension to global overall perspective as a starting point, and the concept of team EQ was proposed.

Goleman (1998) holds the view in that an overall EQ level determines the utilization of enterprise knowledge capital, as well as its overall performance level. For now, team EQ is a new concept, but it attracted more and more scholars and managers attentions, and its importance has gradually emerged. Team EQ makes up the insufficient explanation by team work skill level and team member cognitive ability for the differences on the team performance, and also assesses team performance management from a new perspective. At present, the study on relationship between team EQ and team performance is becoming the hot topic about theory and practice management.