Stephen Billing’s Blog

At the Control or Care of the Self conference in Hamburg in July, Jason Hughes (right) caught my attention with his paper critiquing emotional intelligence. The others in the photo are Stefanie Ernst (our host in Hamburg) and Sam Binkley (Boston).

You have no doubt come across Daniel Goleman’s concept of emotional intelligence. Hughes pointed out that the promise of emotional intelligence is to open the door to talk about emotion at work. On the other hand it makes the emotions into something that can be labeled and measured.

The concept of emotional intelligence promises the management of emotions at work. It repackages human emotions as a corporate concern. The ability to measure people’s emotions appeals to the perceived requirement for managers to inspire the hearts and minds of their people to perform exceptionally well for their employer. This leads to a kind of quest to colonise employee emotions in the service of their goals for the organisation.

The concept of emotional intelligence configures emotions as abilities that are properties of the person that can be developed intentionally by the individual. There is no notion of the social development of the self in emotional intelligence as there is in the work of G H Mead, Norbert Elias and Ralph Stacey.

Although I notice that Goleman now talks about social intelligence, his view of social intelligence seems to be a bolt on to emotional intelligence  and the two terms are used interchangeably.

Emotional intelligence allows you to experience emotions, as long as the expression of them is ‘appropriate.’ For example, you can become angry, as long as it is in the right degree and expressed appropriately. Not only is there an expressive element to EI (express your anger) but it is also subtly suppressive (express it only in appropriate ways), and the suppressive component is hidden – or at least not obvious.

Emotional intelligence has a further worrying fish hook that Hughes identified. In the past, if you made a mistake at work, you would be seen as a bad worker. Now, if you make a mistake in the expression of your emotions you will be seen as a bad person. This amounts to little more than a personal judgment that is lent an aura of scientific rigour by the measurement scales of emotional intelligence.

For a person with emotional intelligence, read a person who expresses desirable emotions. For a person lacking emotional intelligence, read a person who expresses undesirable emotions. Who decides what is desirable or undesirable?

I don’t doubt that if Daniel Goleman were to read this, he would take exception to what I have said here. You might be a supporter of emotional intelligence. Whatever your stance might be, I would be interested to hear what you think.