Critically Discuss Emotional Intelligence and Employee Performance

Introduction

In the recent management research field, Emotional Intelligence concept becomes one of the core trepidation to organization as it affects the performance of employee. Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a set of abilities to identify one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to understand and manage individual’s thinking and actions encouraging personal growth (Salovey & Mayer, 1990, 773). EI can be use to foresee organization members work performance because most of the organization need the aptitude to control their emotions such as stress or motivation to achieve their goals. The EI concept had been integrating into organization employee’s development programs and in business school, they added training competencies as part of their course. To manage EI, it depends on the sensitivity in their physical responds before the dilemma begins. Employees who said to have high EI usually have the ability to solve their problems because they can control their emotions to adjust the feeling of stress or frustration to the minimum (Cooper & Sawaf, 1997). Comparing to employees with lower EI, they don’t have the full abilities to control their own feeling which stressor normally occurred. The benefit of EI is that the use of emotions can ease job performance where one of the four dimensions models of EI can be use both positive and negative emotions to improve their performance (George & Brief, 1996, 328). Base on Wong & Law research, those with higher EI who control their own emotions as well other’s emotion can encourage positive relations that lead to organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) which generally improve performance (2002). This essay purpose is to critically discuss the connection between EI (emotional intelligence) and EP (employee performance).

A brief summary of the concept of emotional intelligence

The concept of emotional intelligence was introduce in the 1990s by Salovey and Mayer which comes from several research in social...