Emotional Intelligence Is Overrated

Not long ago, the CEO of a sales company mentioned that he was spending millions of dollars to train his employees in emotional intelligence. He asked if it was possible to assess emotional intelligence during the interview process, which would allow him to hire salespeople who already excelled in this area.

I said yes, it can be done—but I wouldn’t recommend doing it.

Warning: if you’re a devoted member of an emotional intelligence cult, you may have a strong negative reaction to the data in this post. In case that happens, I’ve offered some guidance at the bottom on how to respond.

To make sure we’re on the same page, let’s be clear about what emotional intelligence is. Experts agree that it has three major elements: perceiving, understanding, and regulating emotions. Perceiving emotions is your ability to recognize different feelings. When looking at someone’s face, do you know the difference between joy and contentment, anxiety and sadness, or surprise and contempt? Understanding emotions is how well you identify the causes and consequences of different feelings. For example, can you figure out what will make your colleagues frustrated versus angry? Frustration occurs when people are blocked from achieving a goal; anger is a response to being mistreated or wronged. Regulating emotions is your effectiveness in managing what you and others feel. If you have a bad day but need to give an inspiring speech, can you psych yourself up and motivate your audience anyway?

I told the CEO that although these skills could be useful in sales, he’d be better off assessing cognitive ability. That’s traditional intelligence: the capability to reason and solve verbal, logical, and mathematical problems. Salespeople with high cognitive ability would be able to analyze information about customer needs and think on their feet to keep customers coming back. The CEO was convinced that emotional intelligence would matter more.

To see who was right, we designed a study. Working with Dane Barnes of Optimize Hire, we gave hundreds of salespeople two validated tests of emotional intelligence that measured their abilities to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions. We also gave them a five-minute test of their cognitive ability, where they had to solve a few logic problems. Then, we tracked their sales revenue over several months.

Cognitive ability was more than five times more powerful than emotional intelligence. The average employee with high cognitive ability generated annual revenue of over $195,000, compared with $159,000 for those with moderate cognitive ability and $109,000 for those with low cognitive ability. Emotional intelligence added nothing after measuring cognitive ability.

The CEO wasn’t convinced: maybe they didn’t take the emotional intelligence test seriously enough. We ran the study again—this time with hundreds of job applicants, who knew that their results could affect whether they were hired. Once again, cognitive ability dramatically outperformed emotional intelligence.

I happen to find emotional intelligence fascinating; I teach the topic in the classroom and have published my own research on it. As much as I like it, though, I believe it’s a mistake to base hiring or promotion decisions on it.

A few years ago, researchers Dana Joseph and Dan Newman wanted to find out how much emotional intelligence really influenced job performance. They compiled every systematic study that has ever tested emotional intelligence and cognitive ability in the workplace—dozens of studies with thousands of employees in 191 different jobs.

When Daniel Goleman popularized emotional intelligence in 1995, he argued provocatively that "it can matter more than IQ." But just as I found with salespeople, every study comparing the two has shown the opposite. In Joseph and Newman’s comprehensive analysis, cognitive ability accounted for more than 14% of job performance. Emotional intelligence accounted for less than 1%.

This isn’t to say that emotional intelligence is useless. It's relevant to performance in jobs where you have to deal with emotions every day, like sales, real estate, and counseling. If you’re selling a house or helping people cope with tragedies, it’s very useful to know what they’re feeling and respond appropriately. But in jobs that lack these emotional demands—like engineering, accounting, or science—emotional intelligence predicted lower performance. If your work is primarily about dealing with data, things, and ideas rather than people and feelings, it’s not necessarily advantageous to be skilled in reading and regulating emotions. If your job is to fix a car or balance numbers in a spreadsheet, paying attention to emotions might distract you from working efficiently and effectively.

Even in emotionally demanding work, when it comes to job performance, cognitive ability still proves more consequential than emotional intelligence. Cognitive ability is the capacity to learn. The higher your cognitive ability, the easier it is for you to develop emotional intelligence when you need it. (This is one of the reasons that emotional intelligence and cognitive ability turn out to correlate positively, not negatively.)

As better tests of emotional intelligence are designed, our knowledge may change. But for now, the best available evidence suggests that emotional intelligence is not a panacea. Let’s recognize it for what it is: a set of skills that can be beneficial in situations where emotional information is rich or vital.

If you felt intense negative emotions while reading this post, it’s an excellent opportunity to put emotional intelligence into action.

Step 1: recognize the emotion. Is it disgust? Probably not—that’s usually reserved for gross foods, sights, and smells. Is it hostility? More likely: hostility is anger directed toward other people.

Step 2: analyze the causes of the emotion. Why are you feeling hostile? Years ago, the psychologist George Kelly argued that hostility occurs when we are attempting to “extort confirmation of personal hypotheses that have already proved themselves to be invalid.” In other words, you might be feeling hostile because the data are clear that emotional intelligence has been overrated, but you don’t want to admit it.

Step 3: regulate the emotion. Maybe this isn’t as terrible as it seems. You’ve been able to update invalidated beliefs before. Napoleon wasn’t short. Pluto isn’t technically a planet. Swimming after eating isn’t dangerous. Miley Cyrus isn’t actually a great role model. The LOST writers didn’t really have a master plan.

***

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, the bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg, and the host of the TED podcast WorkLife. He shares insights every month in his free newsletter, GRANTED.

Top Photo: liveostockimages and Anita Ponne / shutterstock

Lower Image credit: HBO, Silicon Valley

Luis Beute

Business Advisor | Commercial Strategy | Board Advisor | NED | Cross-Cultural Savvy | Sales | SaaS / OTT / CDN / Cybersecurity

1y

Adam Grant - one relevant point in this discussion, which started by the example of training employees in emotional intelligence, is how much IQ and EQ can be improved in adults. As you rightly said, EQ is the ability to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions, which I presumed can be trained. For instance, paying attention to no-verbal communication is something that people can learn to improve their perception skills. Being conscious about adopting a scientist versus preacher thinking mode, will definitely improve EQ, won't it?. Are there any studies about how much EQ can be increased compared IQ? I think your example about sales people and revenues is a bit biased; something more convincing would be analysing sales people with same IQ and different levels of EQ, and compare performance.

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Pramod Agrawal

Leadership & Change - Practitioner | Coach | Persuader

1y

Adam Grant - thanks for sharing an interesting & intriguing perspective. It triggers curiosity, if in an individual (who is by definition indivisible) can we really separately assess which of two abilities (cognitive & emotional) the person is deploying during the selling interaction with another individual? Is a smile, or a greeting considered a cognitive ability or an emotional ability? Is cold or warm eye contact considered cognitive or emotional? Is body language, and gesture considered cognitive or emotional abilities? Is listening to understand their need strictly considered a cognitive or emotional ability? Also, interesting to know what are they selling. I am looking at this argument together with other data pointing out that 94% of our communication with another individual is non-verbal.

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Marilen Stengel

Partner in talent development.Focus in diversity and gender. Speaker, writer and facilitator in learning experiences.

1y

Why do you speak of negative emotions? In my opinion, there is no such thing. Emotions are indispensable to survival and it is not the emotion that is negative, but how people manage them that can be considered negative.

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Justin Bowman

Empathy I Kindness I Respect I CuriosityI Transparency I Authenticity I Stewardship - On this journey together!

2y

As someone who trends higher in IQ than EQ personally, but also has a counseling background, I really think that, taking a step back, this article says less about individuals and more about the fact that there is a definite lack of EQ in our current business systems from the top down. People with lower EQ are allowed to rise to the top while EQ is seen as soft, weak or plebeian. I think the bigger question is, is this the way it SHOULD be?

Quinn Buckland

Independent Author at Self-Employed

2y

No, I totally felt disgusted reading this. Not at the studies or the assertion that cognitive intelligence is as important or more so than emotional intelligence based on the job and what is needed to perform said job competently. No, I was disgusted at the nya-nya tone this had throughout. Grant, using terms such as "devoted member of an emotional intelligence cult" and "You’ve been able to update invalidated beliefs before", as well as asserting that any supposed hostility is just a matter of confirmation bias is not only intentionally divisive but is outwardly vying for an emotional response. I love to learn new things. I love to have my preconceived notions turned upside down. That's how we learn. But, I'm much less likely to listen or take the word of someone who is actively being a prick and hides his (nearly 10-year old by this point) data behind a paywall.

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