Assessing Workplace Emotional Intelligence: Development and Validation of an Ability-based Measure

Abstract

Existing measures of Emotional Intelligence (EI), defined as the ability to perceive, understand, and manage emotions for productive purposes, have displayed limitations in predicting workplace outcomes, likely in part because they do not target this context. Such considerations led to the development of an ability EI measure with work-related scenarios in which respondents infer the likely emotions (perception) and combinations of emotion (understanding) that would occur to protagonists while rating the effectiveness of ways of responding (management). Study 1 (n = 290 undergraduates) used item-total correlations to select scenarios from a larger pool and Study 2 (n = 578) reduced the measure-termed the NEAT-to 30 scenarios on the basis of structural equation modeling. Study 3 (n = 96) then showed that the NEAT had expected correlations with personality and cognitive ability and Study 4 (n = 85) demonstrated convergent validity with other ability EI measures. Last, study 5 (n = 91) established that the NEAT had predictive validity with respect to job satisfaction, job stress, and job performance. The findings affirm the importance of EI in the workplace in the context of a valid new instrument for assessing relevant skills.

On being nice and effective: Work‐related emotional intelligence and its role in conflict resolution and interpersonal problem‐solving

“…The NEAT assesses EI in performance-based rather than self-reported terms, and its correlations with personality traits tend to be modest (Krishnakumar et al, 2016). Accordingly, it seemed likely that the NEAT (or W-EI) would continue to predict the various outcomes of Studies 1-3 even after controlling for extraversion and agreeableness, two traits of the Big 5 that have some relevance to the outcomes that we focused on (e.g., Wood & Bell, 2008).…”

“…The SJT literature (Whetzel & McDaniel, 2009) was followed in writing 1 to 2 sentence scenarios (e.g., "There have been widespread layoffs in Margie's organization recently," "Stephan saw his coworker struggling to a considerable extent," "Jim had a coworker take credit for what he had accomplished") and the EI literature (MacCann & Roberts, 2008;Mayer, Salovey, Caruso, & Sitarenois, 2003) was followed in writing the NEAT's perception, understanding, and management items (Krishnakumar et al, 2016). Perception items require test takers to label the emotions that a protagonist would feel (e.g., by rating the extent to which Margie would feel anger in the first situation), understanding items require inferring which blends of emotions might be present (e.g., by rating the extent to which Jim would experience both disgust and sadness, together, in the second situation), and management items require rating the effectiveness of different courses of action (e.g., by rating how effective it would be to "encourage the co-worker to try harder" in the third situation).…”

“…Rather than using tasks with unknown social significance (e.g., judging the emotions conveyed by abstract paintings), Krishnakumar, Hopkins, Szmerekovsky, and Robinson (2016) embedded all of their North Dakota emotional abilities test (NEAT) items within a situational judgment test (SJT) format. Rather than using tasks with unknown social significance (e.g., judging the emotions conveyed by abstract paintings), Krishnakumar, Hopkins, Szmerekovsky, and Robinson (2016) embedded all of their North Dakota emotional abilities test (NEAT) items within a situational judgment test (SJT) format.…”

“…Employees with higher NEAT scores report lesser job stress, greater job satisfaction, and better job performance (Krishnakumar et al, 2016). Employees with higher NEAT scores report lesser job stress, greater job satisfaction, and better job performance (Krishnakumar et al, 2016).…”

Responsiveness to the Negative Affect System as a Function of Emotion Perception

“…In that paper, moderately strong positive correlations were observed among self-reported (akin to Study 1), emotion labeling (akin to Study 2), and word rating (akin to Study 3) measures of EI (also see Bänziger, Mortillaro, & Scherer, 2012; MacCann & Roberts, 2008; Mayer et al, 2003). Although the Krishnakumar et al (2014) measures did not overlap perfectly with the present ones, there nonetheless appear to be both conceptual and empirical reasons for emphasizing the skills common to the perceptual EI assessments that were used.…”