Emotional Intelligence
People who are good at recognizing the emotions of others earn more money in their jobs
-Research findings by the UNIVERSITY OF BONN reported NOVEMBER 19, 2014
Sloan's thoughts
My research detailed in this website shows that emotional intelligence, as reported below, is not the same ability as Social Quotient, which is a charisma-like ability to get others to like and want to be near you. My research indicated that high school teachers could often identify which students would score highly on likability or Social Quotient - an identification skill which I describe as emotional intelligence. But often such teachers were not charismatic or high SQ individuals themselves. They could recognize high SQ in others but did not have a high SQ themselves. I predict that while a high emotional intelligence ability can lead to higher earnings, a high SQ score for an individual should bring even higher earnings within a job category, be it teachers, plumbers, or managers.
Comment of Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner - in answer to a question on the most important work skill not taught in schools:
"Teamwork. You have to know how to work with people and to get people to want to work with you." (on CNN Global Public Square on November 30, 2014)
Jeff ought to know - a graduate of Yale and Stanford Business School, he was paid $32.5 million by Time Warner in 2013
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the Journal of Organizational Behavior/ University of Bonn comments are below.
from http://www.psypost.org/2014/11/people-good-recognizing-emotions-others-earn-money-jobs-29601
Attending to and caring about the emotions of employees and colleagues – that’s for wimps, not for tough businesspeople and efficient performers, right? Wrong! An extensive international study has now shown: The “ability to recognize emotions” affects income. The corresponding author of the study is Professor Dr. Gerhard Blickle of the Department of Psychology at the University of Bonn. The results are published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
“Although managing employees and dealing with people often involves reading their emotions and determining their moods, not everyone is good at it,” Blickle says. “It’s the same as foreign languages or athletics: some people are good at it, while others aren’t. Most people can do a sit-up. But not everyone is an Olympic champion.” In order to compare and measure how well someone can recognize the emotions of other people, the researchers used a validated collection of images and recordings of actors and children – that is, of people who have learned to clearly express their feelings or who do not want to hide their feelings in an “adult” manner. These emotion expressions (24 pictures of faces and 24 voice recordings) were then shown to 142 working adults who were recruited to participate in this research study. The participants were asked to recognize the emotion expression – whether it was angry or sad, happy or scared, for example. “On average, the participants succeeded in 77 percent of the cases,” Blickle reports. “People who succeeded in 87 percent of the cases were considered to be good, and people who succeeded in more than 90 percent of the cases were considered really good. Those below 60 percent, in contrast, were seen as not so good in recognizing emotions.”
Once the emotion recognition task was completed, the researchers asked the participants’ colleagues and supervisors to assess the political skills of the participants (for example, whether participants socially well attuned, influential, apparently sincere, and good as networkers). According to Blickle, the result indicated that people with a good ability to recognize emotions “are considered more socially and politically skilled than others by their colleagues. Their supervisors also attribute better social and political skills to these people. And, most notably, their income is significantly higher.”
The “special strength” of the study is “that we were able to exclude alternative explanations,” Blickle adds. Numerous factors affect the income of an employee: biological sex, age, training, weekly working hours, and hierarchical position in the company. “We controlled for all these variants,” Blickle reports. “The effect of the ability to recognize emotions on income still remained.” And, the researchers replicated their own findings in an independent second study with 156 participants, thus underpinning the robustness of their results.
Can the ability to recognize feelings be increased?
The researchers have come to the conclusion that, among other things, more value should be placed on the skill of recognizing emotions in the selection of managers – especially in professions where contact with people is important. “Often we hear managers speak of understanding and esteem,” Blickle says critically, “but when we look at their management behavior, we realize that they have neither.”
Can the ability to recognize emotions be trained with a lasting impact? Various methods exist that presumably enhance “emotional intelligence”. But as Blickle explains, these methods often fall short of effectively training the ability to recognize the feelings of others in the first place because it is implicitly assumed that this ability is already well honed among those who do such trainings. “I know of no study of high scientific standards that showed that the recognition of emotions lastingly can be improved,” Blickle adds. More research is necessary to answer this question.