Yes. Research reveals that the concept of emotional intelligence is not well defined and seems to be conflated with other variables such as IQ and personality. The validity of tests designed to measure emotional intelligence, hinges on their ability to assign scores to item responses purported to measure EQ. One of the most prominent of these is the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso-Emotional-Intelligence-Test (MSCEIT) developed by the researchers who were pioneers in the development of EQ. This is a test of 141 items dedicated to assessing an individual’s EQ in these four areas: perceiving emotions, facilitating thought, understanding emotions, and managing emotions. A sub-test in the area of managing emotions includes several items to analyze how well the individual calms their negative emotions. For example, one of the items attempting to assess the management of anger reads:
When you are ANGRY with someone at work which statement best describes you?
• I calm down within 5-10 minutes and let it go, and return to what I was doing without thinking about the incident again.
• I stay angry all morning and sigh and roll my eyes, so people know I am irritated, but then I get over it by the afternoon and forget about it.
• I go to bed still angry and go over and over what happened.
• I stay angry for days and in some cases even weeks or months. I don’t forget quickly and can let things fester.
Assigning scores to the answers was a challenge for those who constructed the tests, for it’s unclear which of these behaviors is most conducive to success in the workplace. Although the test creators might assign the highest score to the first response, there are cases when the third response is optimal. Often when we mull over events, our unconscious mind enters problem solving mode and we awake the next morning with the anger abated, and a creative solution in mind. This is a method that has been used by many creative people.
To decide how to score an item, the test creators administered it to a large sample of people, tallied their responses, and weighted each response according to how often it was selected. A test-taker’s score on the test became a measure of how closely that individual’s responses matched the consensus of those sampled. This contrasts with the IQ test in which the answers are either correct or incorrect and not subject to opinion.
Nathan Brody in his article titled, What Cognitive Intelligence Is and What Emotional Intelligence is Not, contrasts tests of IQ and EQ to explain how this consensual approach undermines the validity of the latter:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160207093225/http://psychometriclab.com/Brody.pdf
Lexicographers would rarely, if ever, disagree about the correct definition of a word used in a test of vocabulary. By contrast, experts may very well disagree about the correct answer to an item designed to assess knowledge about managing emotions on the MSCEIT. The existence of correct answers to cognitive ability items implies that it is possible for a person with unusually high cognitive ability to provide a response to an item that is nonconsensual [i.e. so difficult that the majority of respondents would answer incorrectly] and correct. By contrast, responses to the MSCEIT can only be correct if they are consensual.
For example, it might be argued that Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Martha Stewart had excellent people skills, and hence high EQ, because their methods of persuasion, albeit negatively expressed through tantrums, coercion or dominance, enabled them to get their way and have their visions adopted. What the MSCEIT test creators believe to be an appropriate way to handle anger, may not be optimal in many situations. Experience may have taught Jobs, Bezos, and Stewart that tantrums and anger can be useful tools.
The EQ instruments that test for leadership carry implicit preconceived ideas about the emotional skills that are consistent with strong leadership. Steve Tobak, a management consultant and former senior hi-tech executive, in an article on CBS Money Watch titled, “Why Emotional Intelligence is Just a Fad,” stated:
There is no evidence that demonstrates that emotional intelligence is a predictor of leadership success in business … Anecdotally, if you look at great CEOs like Andy Grove, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, you won’t find much in the way of soft skills. The same is true of Google’s (GOOG) Larry Page and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Of course there are plenty of counterexamples, but that’s really the point. It’s not at all clear that any particular management or leadership type, skill-set, or intelligence — emotional or otherwise — makes sense across the board.
That is, the leadership skills needed to motivate and achieve results through a group of people might depend to a large extent on the nature of the group. An old adage asserts, “There are three kinds of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.” A leader may have the social skills needed to motivate the people who “make things happen,” but not the skills to motivate the bewildered group. Robert Oppenheimer was an excellent leader for the Manhattan Project and was able to focus a group of brilliant, eccentric physicists to the shared purpose of building an atomic bomb, because he too was a nerd and understood a nerd’s natural resistance to the herd instinct. Gifted individuals like Stanislav Ulam, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Richard Feynman were men with strong egos, who would never accept the leadership of someone they didn’t respect as one of their own. And yet, Oppenheimer, who was remarkably successful in his leadership of this esteemed group may not have been as successful leading a group of ill-behaved boys in a paramilitary school. Similarly, the team-building techniques that may work with a group of middle level managers may not apply to a group of eccentric individuals. In short, leadership skills may vary significantly with the types of individuals to be led.
In general, the concepts of EQ are not sufficiently precise to lend themselves to objective evaluation. Emotional intelligence is something we might recognize when we see someone who is highly skilled at achieving desired results through people, but defining it in a measurable way is so far beyond our grasp.
