Notion of emotional intelligence - survey of literature

Abstract

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, one of the most important leaders of twentieth century was a beacon of non-violent struggle in the most violent century of human history. He led mass movements that shook the roots of the mighty British Empire and ultimately brought independence to India. He must have been one of the most intelligent human beings of the century, along side great scientists like Albert Einstein and Alan Turing, if the definition of intelligence is the ability to get things done or to succeed in life. But, surprisingly, he was just an average student in his class. There are countless other examples of individuals with seemingly average intelligence having done well in life. This has led people to believe that there is more to intelligence than the traditional measures of general intelligence like IQ. The study of human intelligence has been perhaps the most interesting but controversial area in psychology. Psychologists began an extensive enquiry into the field of intelligence in the early twentieth century, when concepts like general intelligence (Spearman, 1904) were defined to gauge the intelligence level of new recruits in the US army for World War I. One of the earliest definitions of intelligence was a “general adaptability to the new problems and conditions of life”. But it was contested by many scholars as provided no clue to judging the value of different level of adaptations (Terman, 1921). Some even argued that intelligence is not a single mental process capable of analytic definition (Haggerty, 1922). Sternberg in his excellent treatise on human abilities concurred that different cultures designate as intelligent the cognitive, social, and behavioral attributes that they value as adaptive to the requirements of living in those cultures (Sternberg, 1998). Intelligence as it is understood in common parlance now a days is actually cognitive intelligence which is defined as a “set of mental abilities that permit the recognition, learning, memory for, and the capacity to reason about a particular form of information” (Bersade, Roberts et al, 2007).The basic idea of intelligence was born as a predictor to success. And for long IQ tests like CAT, SAT and GRE which measure cognitive intelligence have been used to discriminate among the applicants for a particular course or job. But the domination of cognitive intelligence theory was challenged by a startling claim that the general intelligence or cognitive intelligence has been found to predict only 20% of the success in jobs (Goleman, 1995). The separation of practical intelligence from IQ has been shown in a number of different ways in a number of different studies. This encouraged researchers to focus on the non-cognitive aspects of intelligence like emotional intelligence. In the past 30 years there has been increased level of interest in the field of emotion and reasoning. Ever since the publication of Daniel Goleman’s book on Emotional intelligence brought this term to limelight, there has been an array of research and publication on this topic in various books, magazines and journals. It is termed as not the triumph of head over heart but rather a unique intersection of both. In this work we survey the literature of last 18 years to find how the term emotional intelligence evolved, to arrive at a proper scientific definition of the term and evaluate various methods to measure EQ. Later we explain why EI is important for managers and how it can be developed in the corporate scenario. Finally we conclude with the suggestions for future research and an active criticism of the current state of research in EI.