Clarifications

Correcting common misconceptions about emotional intelligence

• EI vs. IQ: Which Is More Important?
• A clarification

EI vs. IQ: Which is More Important?

From: Cary Cherniss, Melissa Extein, Daniel Goleman and Roger Weissberg, "Emotional Intelligence: What Does the Research Really Indicate?" Educational Psychologist, 2006 (in press)

"Critics of EI theory often refer to common misreadings of Goleman’s position concerning the relative importance of EI for success and happiness in life. They focus particularly on his purported claims that EI is more important than IQ for effective performance in the workplace. In a new introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Emotional Intelligence, Goleman (2005) clarifies ambiguities in his earlier writings that encouraged two widespread conclusions that he did not intend: The claim that EI accounts for 80 percent of life success, and that it out-performs IQ in predicting academic achievement. He takes neither of those positions. As Goleman (2001, p. 22) writes:

My belief is that if a longitudinal study were done, IQ would be a much stronger predictor than EI of which jobs or professions people can enter. Because IQ stands as a proxy for the cognitive complexity a person can process, it should predict what technical expertise that person can master. Technical expertise, in turn, represents the major set of threshold competencies that determine whether a person can get and keep a job in a given field. IQ, then, plays a sorting function in determining what jobs people can hold. However, having enough cognitive intelligence to hold a given job does not by itself predict whether one will be a star performer or rise to management or leadership positions in one’s field.

Goleman (2005, xiv-xv) clarifies: "IQ washes out when it comes to predicting who, among a talented pool of candidates within an intellectually demanding profession will become the strongest leader. In part this is because of the floor effect: everyone at the top echelons of a given profession, or at the top levels of a large organization, has already been sifted for intellect and expertise. At those lofty levels a high IQ becomes a threshold ability, one needed just to get into and stay in the game."

Because of the floor effect for IQ, Goleman proposes that EI abilities, rather than IQ or technical skills, will better discriminate those who will be most capable in top positions. EI matters greatly in selecting, promoting and developing leaders. One methodology for identifying such discriminating abilities is competence modeling (Spencer & Spencer, 1993), a technique well-known in organizational psychology, and one used routinely by major corporations, as well as by the Office of Personnel /Management for the entire U.S. civil service, to identify the best candidates for high-level jobs and for promotion. The multitude of competence models generated independently by organizations themselves suggest that for top leadership positions, the most critical competencies draw heavily on EI; IQ itself (or surrogates such as technical proficiency) drop out as predictors of excellence in high-level jobs, though they matter more for excellence in lower-level positions (Goleman et al., 2002).

Questions about the relative contribution of EI and IQ arose from a considerable body of previous research suggesting that IQ accounts for a relatively small amount of the variance in important life outcomes. Waterhouse questions the validity of this research, pointing to one study that she says is not credible because it was not based on a single study but rather a "review judgment" of the authors. Apparently she is not aware of several meta-analyses that consistently show that IQ and other tests of cognitive ability account for no more than about 25 percent of the variance in outcomes. Often, that figure is considerably less.

One of the most recent of these studies looked at the relation between cognitive intelligence and leadership effectiveness. The authors concluded that "the relationship between intelligence and leadership is considerably lower than previously thought," with a corrected correlation coefficient of only .27 (Judgeet al., 2004, p. 542). In other words, cognitive intelligence accounted for less than 8 percent of the variability in leadership effectiveness."

A clarification

To clear up a confusion, Daniel Goleman has changed the text in Working With Emotional Intelligence on page 41 as follows, with changes noted in italics:

The Ratio of Excellence

I was lucky enough to have access to competence models for 181 different positions drawn from 121 companies and organizations worldwide, with their combined workforce numbering in the millions. The models showed what management in each organization believed distinguished star performers from average in a given job.

My analysis was straightforward: I compared which distinguishing competencies for a given job, role, or field could be classed as purely cognitive or technical skills, and which were emotional competencies. For instance, fifteen key competencies were listed for outstanding information technology project managers at Amoco. Of these, four were purely cognitive or technical, while the rest fell in the emotional competence category. Simple math yields the finding: 73 percent of the abilities identified by Amoco as key to superior performance in this job were emotional competencies.

When I applied this method to all 181 competence models I had studied, I found that 67 percent – two out of three – of the abilities thought to distinguish the best performers were emotional competencies. Compared to IQ and expertise, emotional competence mattered twice as much in what set stars apart from the average. This held true across all categories of jobs, and in all kinds of organizations.