Emotional Intelligence Cote & Hideg's

Emotional Intelligence Cote & Hideg's article,"the ability to influence others via emotion displays: a new dimension of emotional intelligence" -- a critique Emotional intelligence (EI) is a set of abilities that has to do with processing emotions and emotional information (opposed to cognitive processes). EI is, in essence, the ability to recognize, analyze and control the emotions of one's own self or others -- including a group of people.

Some people believe EI is something that people learn and can actually hone, but others believe that EI is innate, something that an individual is born with. Researchers Salovey and Mayer are two of the most prominent researchers in the area of EI and wrote in their seminal article "Emotional Intelligence" that EI can be defined as "the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and other's feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions" (1990).

The two researchers came up with four distinct branches of EI: the perception of emotion, the ability to reason using emotions, the ability to understand emotions, and the ability to manage emotions (1990). This topic is especially interesting because it is all about communication on an emotional level, communication without words that is based solely on a person's ability to perceive and understand human emotion and use it to his or her advantage.

Summary and Interpretation: In the article, "The ability to influence others via emotion displays: a new dimension of emotional intelligence," Cote and Hideg (2010) discuss a new area of EI -- the ability to influence others with displays of emotion -- which they claim is becoming increasingly relevant in organizational settings.

In earlier years, the research on emotions in organizational settings was mainly focused on intrapersonal effects -- the effects of one individual's emotions on that individual's own thoughts and actions (2010), which illustrated that the emotions of organization members impact their own judgments, decisions, and their own behavior (2010). However, Cote and Hideg (2010) believe that this new area of EI is different in that one's emotional displays would be able to influence other members of an organization, which could work to their advantage.

Strengths: One of the strengths of this article is that it describes and explains how people use different types of methods to alter what emotions they decide to show to another (because whatever emotions they show can influence others). The article proposes that there are some individuals who have a greater ability to influence others via emotions. People who are able to do this can decide what exactly they want to elicit from the other person and then choose an emotion in order to get the desired result.

These emotional communications are very important as they can impart very rich information (2010). Others often respond to these emotions because when they do, it offers them a lot of information about what kind of behavior they can expect from another. Another strength is that the article notes that more discrete emotions have evolved in order for individuals to be able to communicate what they are thinking, feeling, what their goals are, etc.

Early studies have shown that people are able to actually infer another's disposition (particularly dominance and affiliation) (Cote & Hideg 2010) just by displays of emotion. All else equal people who display anger or disgust are perceived to be high in dominance and low in affiliation, those who display happiness are thought to be high on both traits, and those who display fear or sadness are believed to be low on both traits.

In the domain of conflict management, negotiators who display happiness are believed to be satisfied with the current state of affairs (Cote & Hideg 2010). Weaknesses: The article claims that research has suggested that people are especially attuned to identify information about emotions in their environments -- probably because these cues have evolutionary significance (Cote & Hideg 2010). However, the article does not go into great detail about why people are more likely to identify information in their own environment.

This seems like an important element of EI when it comes to an organization setting and the researchers could have explained this a bit better and why they believe it to be the case. Implications for Theory: Cote and Hideg (2010) do an apt job at illustrating how having the ability to influence others with emotion displays may help demonstrate competence in organizations: "affective reactions and strategic inferences" (2010). Their argument is sound and it is quite simply a branch of EI, which is already a well-researched topic.

EI has already illustrated that it can influence other individuals' behaviors and so putting it in context of the organizational setting makes sense. The article is intended to be read by both researchers in the field of EI as well as those in leadership positions in organizations. Leaders of.