The concept of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence has recently emerged in both academic and popular literature as a concept with the potential to provide new insights into the effect of human interaction. One type of interaction frequently found in the organizational context is that of team members. Team members must be skilled in emotional intelligence in order to deal with interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts, raise communication and commitment, and to accomplish their goals.
Numerous researchers do insist that emotional intelligence is real and should be a valuable and necessary component of every workforce. When psychologists began to write and think about intelligence, they focused on the cognitive aspects, such as memory and problem solving. In 1943, Wechsler was proposing that the non-intellective abilities are essential for predicting one’s ability to succeed in life. Robert Thorndike, wrote about ‘Social Intelligence’ in the late thirties. By early 1990, there was a long tradition of research on the role of non-cognitive factors in helping people to succeed in both life and the workplace.
The merging of emotion and intelligence as a cognitive ability under the caption of Emotional Intelligence was proposed by a Yale psychologist, Salovey and Mayer (1990) of University of New Hampshire. They described Emotional Intelligence as the accurate appraisal and expression of emotion in the self and others, the adaptive regulation of emotion in the self and others, and the utilization of emotion to facilitate performance.
In the early 1990’s Daniel Goleman become aware of Salovey and Mayer’s work, and this eventually led to his book, Emotional Intelligence. Goleman become familiar with a wealth of research pointing to the importance of social and emotional abilities for personal success. Some of this research came from Personality and Social Psychology, and some came from the field of Neuropsychology