Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the capacity to recognize, understand, and manage one’s own emotions while also recognizing and influencing the emotions of others. In organizational and leadership contexts, it is often treated as a skill set distinct from, and complementary to, raw cognitive intelligence.

Early roots and the ability model

Usage of emotion-related intelligence concepts predates the popular term: a 1964 paper by Michael Beldoch and a 1966 paper by B. Leuner both discussed related ideas. Psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan proposed a developmental model touching on emotional intelligence in 1989. The following year, psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer published their own influential model, defining emotional intelligence as an ‘ability model’ built from four core abilities: perceiving emotions accurately, using emotions to facilitate thinking, understanding emotional meanings, and regulating one’s own and others’ emotions.

Daniel Goleman and the mixed model

The term reached a mass audience with Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Goleman proposed what researchers now call a ‘mixed model,’ combining five constructs: self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy, and motivation. He later extended this work in a Harvard Business Review article connecting emotional intelligence directly to leadership performance, drawing on examples including observations at Johnson & Johnson, and arguing that senior leaders with strong emotional intelligence consistently outperformed equally skilled but less emotionally attuned peers.

Why it matters for leadership

Leadership researchers generally agree that technical skill and IQ predict who gets hired into a role, but emotional intelligence predicts who succeeds once there. Leaders who read a room accurately, manage their own reactions under pressure, and respond to colleagues’ emotional states tend to build more trust and navigate conflict with less collateral damage than leaders who rely on authority alone.

Measuring emotional intelligence

Researchers have developed several instruments intended to assess emotional intelligence, generally falling into two categories: ability-based tests that present scenarios and ask respondents to identify the most emotionally skillful response, and self-report questionnaires that ask people to rate their own emotional habits and tendencies. Because self-report measures rely on a person’s own, potentially inflated self-perception, ability-based tests are generally considered a more objective, though more time-consuming, way to assess emotional skill.

Debate over the construct

Emotional intelligence has also attracted academic skepticism. Critics have questioned whether it represents a genuinely distinct form of intelligence or is better understood as a combination of existing personality traits and general cognitive ability repackaged under a new label. Some researchers have also raised concerns about the construct validity of popular self-report EI measures, noting that they often correlate strongly with established personality dimensions rather than measuring something clearly separate.

Applications beyond leadership

While much of the popular attention to emotional intelligence has focused on leadership and management, the concept is also applied in team dynamics, conflict resolution, customer service training, and education. Teams whose members can accurately read and respond to one another’s emotional states tend to navigate disagreements with less lasting damage to working relationships, and many corporate training programs now include an emotional intelligence component alongside more traditional technical or managerial skill-building.

Self-awareness as a starting point

Across most frameworks, self-awareness is treated as the foundational component that makes the other emotional intelligence skills possible. A person who cannot accurately identify their own emotional state in the moment has little basis for regulating that state, let alone for accurately reading and responding to someone else’s. Many emotional intelligence training programs therefore begin with exercises aimed at simply noticing and naming emotions as they arise, before moving on to regulation and social skills.

Emotional intelligence in hiring and development

Some organizations have incorporated emotional intelligence assessments into hiring and leadership development programs, particularly for roles that depend heavily on interpersonal skill, such as management, sales, and customer-facing positions. Proponents argue this helps identify candidates likely to handle workplace conflict and pressure well, while critics caution that such assessments can be gamed by self-report or may not reliably predict actual on-the-job behavior, reinforcing the broader academic debate over how well emotional intelligence can actually be measured.

Goleman’s own later writing acknowledged this tension, framing emotional intelligence less as a fixed trait someone either has or lacks and more as a set of learnable habits that can be developed with deliberate practice and feedback over time, a framing that has shaped much of the corporate training built around the concept since.

That developmental framing is part of why emotional intelligence training has remained popular in corporate settings even as academic debate over the precise construct continues, since it offers a concrete, practicable skill set regardless of how it is ultimately classified theoretically.

Workshops and coaching programs built around emotional intelligence typically emphasize guided reflection, role-play, and ongoing feedback rather than a one-time assessment alone, treating skill-building as an iterative process.

Over time, consistent practice of these habits is thought to shift how a person handles stress, feedback, and disagreement, which is why many organizations treat emotional intelligence as a long-term development area rather than a box to check once.

That emphasis on sustained practice over a single test score is now a common thread across most contemporary emotional intelligence programs.

FAQs

Did Daniel Goleman invent the term emotional intelligence? No. Earlier academic usages exist from the 1960s, and Salovey and Mayer published a formal psychological model in 1990, five years before Goleman’s book. Goleman is credited with popularizing the concept widely, not coining it.

What are the four abilities in the Salovey-Mayer model? Perceiving emotions, using emotions to aid thinking, understanding emotional meanings, and managing or regulating emotions.

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed November 2, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue