Stress in modern life, competition - between both companies and the individuals within them - the strain of the clock, professional perfectionism, can alter the emotional state of the most 'normal' people. The result, often, is emotional imbalance. However, stress is not the only factor. From loathing to enthusiasm, from frustration to satisfaction, each day we confront our own and other’s emotions. The key is to use emotions in an intelligent way, to make them work to our benefit, to help us control our conduct and indeed our thoughts towards better outcomes.

What and why

It is increasingly accepted that emotions play a fundamental role in organisational life. More importantly, it has become recognised that the acceptance of the emotional life - and the ability to manage emotions - are among the keys to organisational success. Neither raw emotion nor the attempt to deny the relevance of emotion are at all helpful. This recognition is the essence of what has become known as 'emotional intelligence.'

This, in itself, is not new. As Aristotle said:

Anybody can become angry - that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy.

What is new is its recognition within organisations. Today, it is not enough to have a high IQ. A high EQ is also required - the emotional understanding that creates harmony in interaction with our colleagues, staff, suppliers and clients.

Organisations and the 'emotion' word

Emily A. Sterrett, in her book, The Manager's Pocket Guide to Emotional Intelligence, recognises that the 'emotion' word is difficult for Western managers:

The biggest challenge, in my experience, is the use of the word “emotion.” While I think there is a gradually increasing level of respect and support for emotional intelligence, in general the business community is more moved by other ways to phrase these concepts. For example, in my own work I tend to use more frequently phrases like leadership development, interpersonal communications, building relationships and trust, and improving teamwork.

Emotional intelligence applies in all of these, and I often use the same exercises and examples as I use when presenting “Emotional Intelligence.” I just find that people accept them better with a different label. There is still a negative stigma in western culture attached to emotions, and that's unfortunate.

This is unfortunate for, as Professor Stuart-Kotze writes:

Few organisations can be run on a purely rational basis, devoid of any concern for the feelings, emotions, needs and desire of the people in them. However, there is still a (mistaken) current of opinion that when things get tough, hard decisions or a purely rational and objective kind are all that matter.

Such a view is supported by Ann Graham Ehringer in her book, “Make Up Your Mind,” (Merritt Publishing, 1995.) She describes a study of 60 successful businessmen in corporations with revenues from 2 to 400 million dollars. Only one claimed to take commercial decisions solely by use of the classic decisional tree - and even this man added that he took the final decision in an intuitive way. The other interviewees said that they used their feelings to confirm (or to deny) the rational analysis, or else they let themselves be lead by their emotions at the beginning, and only later looked for data or rationalizations to support their insights.

Daniel Goleman, author of several books on Emotional Intelligence, observes that emotions are always present - that we always feel something. Even in the most "rational" of decisions, emotions persist: how else do we decide which criteria to use for evaluating the options in making a decision?

Stuart-Kotze concludes:

Impersonal rationality is not the basis for organisational decision making. Man is not purely a rational being. We are all affected by emotions. However, it is possible to take a rational view of emotions and feelings ...

and to a large extent, this is what EI does. (Sterrett's book provides tips and techniques for strengthening one's EQ skills.)

The benefits

According to Susan Dunn, one of the immediate goals of emotional intelligence is to increase self-awareness - not to the point where you spend all your time analyzing yourself and looking inward, but enough so you can assess quickly your emotional states.

The more you learn about emotions in general, and your own in particular, the more options you have. You will become less puzzled in the grip of an emotion, less rigid in your responses, and better able to think and respond (or not) rather than feeling and reacting mindlessly.

Emotional intelligence is not a magic wand. It doesn’t guarantee a better position in the market or a healthier performance. Nevertheless, if we ignore the human ingredient, none of the rest will work as well as it should. In other words, companies whose people collaborate better have a competitive advantage.

The theory

The pre-cursors of recent work on EI were Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in their 1960's work on what they called 'autopoiesis'. Known by the name 'Santiago Theory' (because both worked in Santiago, Chile), their theory holds that emotions are:

... dynamic dispositions of the body that specify the scope of actions in which animals in general and humans in particular operate at any given moment.

This is clear in such everyday statements such as, “Don’t speak to him. He is angry and won’t listen.” From this point of view, any cognitive process in an animal is also an emotional one. The Santiago Theory explains that it makes no sense to think of a pure rational human being and that there is always at least one emotion behind each action. In fact, even the more rigorous thought is driven by at least one emotion. A chess player, for instance, feels emotions related with winning and self-esteem when deciding how to play.

Goleman's EI

Intelligence is hard to define, but the means that we come to understand it is through "measurements" of various people. Thus, so far, EI has come to mean a measurement of emotions.

Daniel Goleman, grounding his work in the new discoveries of the emotional architecture of the brain, asserts that we have two very different ways of knowing - the rational and the emotional - which are, for the most part

exquisitely coordinated; feelings are essential to thought, thought to feelings.

Going further than treating emotion as equally important as reason, Goleman believes that it is the emotional mind - in his terms, emotional intelligence - that is the major determiner of success in life. He suggests that we are in social crisis and the way out of it is the teaching of EI in schools and the work place.

Goleman describes EI as:

abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one's moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.

He also uses another interesting term to describe EI - "character." Thus, Goleman's definition seems to be an all-encompassing view that covers traits, values, personality, motivation, and character. In fact, he almost defines it as “everything that is not IQ.”

Building on the work of Salovey and Mayer, Goleman describes five major domains of emotional intelligence:

• knowing one's emotions
• managing emotions
• motivating oneself
• recognizing emotions in others
• handling relationships

In Goleman's view, these emotional competencies build on each other in a hierarchy. At the bottom of this hierarchy is the ability to identify one's emotional state. Some knowledge of "knowing one's emotions" is needed to move to the next competency. Likewise, knowledge and/or skill in the first three competencies are needed to read and influence positively other people's emotions. Finally, the first four competencies lead to increased ability to enter and sustain good relationships.

Research results

Daniel Goleman draws on the research by Ruth Jacobs and Wei Chen, researchers from Hay/McBer in Boston. They re-analyzed their data taken from studies carried out in 40 companies, originally designed to evaluate the relative weight of given aptitudes, distinguishing stars from average workers

The results they obtained were clear: the higher purely cognitive aptitudes came out with a frequency 27% higher in the stars than in average workers, while the emotional aptitudes had 53% more frequency. In other words, emotional aptitude is twice as important for excellence as pure intellectual skill.

Goleman writes:

These figures correspond with my own findings: I think this number can be a basic conservative rule regarding the general value of emotional aptitude in the starring role.

In another case, Richard Boyatzis, from Weatherhead School of Management in the Case Western Reserve University, carried a classical study with more than 2000 managers from 12 different organizations. He found 16 features that distinguish stars from average workers, 14 of them were emotional aptitudes.

These results are found again in a broader analysis of the characteristic qualities of star workers, developed by Lyle Spencer Jr, international director of technology and research in Hay/McBer. Spencer’s analysis included aptitude studies in 286 organizations, 2/3 of them in the USA and 1/3 in another 20 countries. The roles analyzed included managerial, selling, technical and scientific, healthcare, government, education, and even those in religious organizations.

From 21 generic aptitudes found by Spencer, 18 were based in EI. From the other 3 aptitudes, 2 were intellectual - analytical capacities and conceptual thought - and one was technical skill. In other words, more than 80% of general aptitudes that distinguish superior workers from the average depend on EI and not on the IQ.

Finally, Claudio Fernadez, (Egon Zehnder International) compared successful and unsuccessful managers and discovered that those who failed almost always had great skills and high IQ. In all cases, the critical weakness was in EI: arrogance, too much faith in brainpower, inability to adapt to change and under-valuing cooperation and teamwork.

Goleman's version of EI is not without its critics. For example, it is said that he makes claims that have no empirical backing, such as EI having a higher predictive validity for performance in the work place than traditional measures of intelligence. Another significant criticism is that emotional intelligence has no "benchmark" to set itself against. While IQ tests are designed to correlate as closely as possible with school grades, emotional intelligence seems to be based on no similar objective measures.

EI and Organizational Learning

There is no doubt that the group mind can be much more effective than the individual mind in many (but not all) tasks. In one experiment, students worked together during a university course. The final test was given in two parts. One set of questions was answered individually and another set as part of a group. In the research carried out by G. W. Hill (“Group Versus Individual Performance”, 1982), the results of hundreds of groups showed that 97% of the cases group’s marks were higher than the best individual’s. The same effect takes place even in extremely short life groups that were formed only for the experiment.

Brenda Scott-Ladd and Christopher Chan, of the Australian National University synthesized a model of how emotional intelligence, organizational learning and participation in decision-making can be operationalized to improve an organization's capacity to manage change and improve performance outcomes. Higher levels of emotional intelligence are reputed to contribute substantially to higher performance outcomes and inter-group relations, and are a prerequisite for organizational learning.

In a similar manner, Limone and Bastias showed that knowledge management (KM) has traditionally focused primarily on the implementation of IT, with greater emphasis being placed on technology rather than on knowledge itself. This has had serious consequences, because it ignores the unavoidable relationship between knowledge and emotions. They suggest that authentic knowledge management must consider also emotions.

Copyright © 2007 by Luis E. Bastias.
Copyright © 2007 by The Working Manager, Ltd.
All Rights Reserved.