Emotional Intelligence is also called Emotional Intelligence Quotient or Emotional Quotient. Emotional Intelligence is the ability of people to understand their own emotions and those of others. Emotions play a different role in each person’s life. It depends on person to person how they use the emotional information to think and behave and adjust and adapt to different environments. The emotional Intelligence term was first used in 1964. However, it gained wide recognition when it was used in 1995’s best-selling book called Emotional Intelligence. The writer of the book was a science journalist Daniel Goleman who defined Emotional Intelligence as the range of skills and features that help to drive leadership abilities.
Different types of models have been formed to measure Emotional Intelligence. The trait model which was designed in 2001 has quite a focus on self-reporting of behavioral moods and distinguished abilities. The ability model which was designed in 2004 measures a person’s skill to process his emotional information and utilize the same to drive the social environment. Recent studies are focusing more on emotional recognition, which is nothing but the attribution of emotional states that are based on observations of visual and auditory non-verbal cues. Neurological studies have also been done to understand the neural mechanisms of emotional intelligence.
According to research, people with high Emotional Intelligence have better mental health and they perform really well on the job, and also possess good leadership abilities. Emotional Intelligence is more focused on empathy as it helps a person to relate with their personal experiences and that of others. Thus, people nowadays are more interested to develop their emotional intelligence so that they can good leaders in whichever area of business or sphere of life.
For example, an inclusive organization had a Human Resource professional whose task was to hire people with disabilities and help them develop their skills and work for their organization based on their strengths. A deaf person was good in sign language and poor in written communication and thus, he was given the job of sign language reporting, a blind person was good at interpreting things based on what they could hear and thus, he was placed to do accessibility testing of e-books, a physically disabled person was good at communication skills and thus, he was given the job of marketing their products and services. The HR person had a good emotional intelligence to understand the strengths of the disabled people as per what tasks they liked to perform and was comfortable with, which helped the organization to function smoothly despite having so many differences in the types of employees.