Emotional Intelligence:
Assorted Research Findings
Research on emotional intelligence is rapidly expanding.  Whether or not emotional intelligence is a viable concept is not longer at question.  An emerging body of research will help us better understand the components of emotional intelligence, change and development strategies, and how these personal characteristics and social abilities play a role in a wide variety of settings.
 
In pursuit of simplifying the visual presentation of this assortment of findings, I have not included references for the various studies.  If you would like to the the source of a particular finding, send me an email and I’ll be happy to provide it for you.
  1. ★The primary cause of career derailment in executives are attributable to deficits in emotional competencies.  The three most important “derailers” are the inability to adapt to change, difficulties working as a member of a team, and poor interpersonal relationships.
  2. ★Only 10% of job terminations result from technical deficiencies, that is, the inability to do the job.  90% of terminations at due to attitudinal or behavioral problems or difficulties with relationships on the job.
  3. ★In leadership, almost 90% of what distinguishes “outstanding leaders” from the rest is attributable to emotional intelligence.  It is becoming referred to as “The 90% Factor” in discussions of leadership success.
  4. ★62% of employees who said they have an effective manager intend to stay on the job.  17% of employees who said they have an ineffective manager said they intend to stay.  Based on a survey of 10,000 US workers and 1000 workers each in India, China, Brazil, the UK, and Germany.  25% rated their managers as neither effective nor ineffective.
  5. ★IQ is a very poor predictor of job success.  Various studies estimate that IQ alone accounts for as little as 4 to 10% of success at work.
  6. ★Studies of people in high-IQ professions requiring advanced degrees such as Ph.D.’s and M.B.A.’s for entry into a field, IQ and training do not differentiate star performers.  This makes sense.  These groups are made up of highly intelligent and trained professionals.  Emotional intelligence accounts for as much as 80% of the variance in differentiating star performers from average performers in these populations.
  7. ★A long-term study of Ph.D. scientists found that social and emotional abilities were four times more important than IQ and training in determining overall career success and level of personal prestige in the scientists’ chosen field of study.
  8. ★At Met Life, a group of job candidates were hired who had failed the normal screening process but score high on optimism.  The outsold a group of pessimists by 21% the first year and 57% the second year.  They even outsold average agents by 27%.
  9. ★Sales reps for a computer company who were hired for emotional competence were 90% more likely to finish their training than reps hired on the basis of other criteria.
  10. ★A study of military leaders found that their individual emotional intelligence where highly related to the presence of emotionally intelligent group norms in the teams they led and that those norms were significantly related to the team’s performance.
  11. ★The most effective leaders in the US Navy are warmer, more outgoing, expressive emotionally, and sociable.
  12. ★65% of American workers have not received recognition from their boss in over a year.  The Department of Labor reports that the number-one reason people leave their jobs is the feeling that they are not appreciated by their management.
  13. ★The higher people rise in the ranks of management, the more likely they are to have distorted self-perceptions.  Senior level managers are likely to rate themselves as much higher on emotional and social competencies than their peers and direct reports rate them.
  14. ★Supervisors in a manufacturing environment were trained in emotional competencies.  This resulted in a 50% decrease in time lost due to accidents; formal grievances dropped from 15 to 3 per year; and, the plant exceeded its annual financial goals by more than a quarter of a million dollars.
  15. ★Accurate self-awareness, a core emotional competency, was associated with superior performance in several hundred managers in a dozen companies.
  16. ★An international executive placement firm has learned through experience that candidates may have all the training and previous job experience to be a perfect fit for open positions but if they lack emotional intelligence, they are likely to fail if placed in those positions.
  17. ★People with strong empathy who more accurately perceive the emotions of other people are better at handling change and build stronger social networks.
  18. ★People who are less able to read the subtleties of body language tend to be less academically successful.
  19. ★Emotional intelligence is a better predictor of academic success in college than high-school grade point averages.
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