In one sense, this question is purely academic: in life, cognitive abilities and Emotional Intelligence always interplay. But in another sense, it has practical implications for significant workplace decisions.
Data establishing the relative contribution of EI and IQ to effective performance would be of both theoretical and practical importance-for instance, providing a scientific rationale for making more balanced decisions in hiring and promotions.
According to Goleman, an individual’s quotient of Emotional Intelligence, or EQ, may actually predict success more accurately than IQ. EQ has a friendlier feel to it – nice guys finish first at last – but it’s far from warm and fuzzy. For one thing, attempts to measure it are alarmingly facile. EQ is a fictitious measure of everything, other than IQ, that helps us get ahead in the world. The term Emotional Quotient, which conflates EQ with IQ, is fictitious in the sense that no accepted test has been devised to determine a person’s EQ.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ) by itself is not a very good predictor of job performance. Hunter and Hunter estimated that at best IQ accounts for about 25 percent of the variance. Sternberg has pointed out that studies vary and that 10 percent may be a more realistic estimate. In some studies, IQ accounts for as little as 4 percent of the variance.
An example of this research on the limits of IQ as a predictor is the Sommerville study, a 40-year longitudinal investigation of 450 boys who grew up in Sommerville, Massachusetts. Two-thirds of the boys were from welfare families, and
one-third had IQ’s below 90. However, IQ had little relation to how well they did at work or in the rest of their lives. What made the biggest difference were childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustration, control emotions, and get along with other people.
Another good example is a study of 80 Ph.D.’s in science who underwent a battery of personality tests, IQ tests, and interviews in the 1950s when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Forty years later, when they were in their early seventies, they were tracked down and estimates were made of their success based on resumes, evaluations by experts in their own fields, and sources like American Men and Women of Science. It turned out that social and emotional abilities were four times more important than IQ in determining professional success and prestige.
Now it would be absurd to suggest that cognitive ability is irrelevant for success in science. One needs a relatively high level of such ability merely to get admitted to a graduate science program at a school like Berkeley. Once one is admitted, however, what matters in terms of how one does compared to ones peers has less to do with IQ differences and more to do with social and emotional factors. To put it another way, if you’re a scientist, you probably needed an IQ of 120 or so simply to get a doctorate and a job. But then it is more important to be able to persist in the face of difficulty and to get along well with colleagues and subordinates than it is to have an extra 10 or 15 points of IQ. The same is true in many other occupations.
It should also be kept in mind that cognitive and non-cognitive abilities are very much related. In fact, there is research suggesting that emotional and social skills actually help improve cognitive functioning. For instance, in the famous “marshmallow studies” at Stanford University, four year olds were asked to stay in a room alone with a marshmallow and wait for a researcher to return. They were told that if they could wait until the researcher came back before eating the marshmallow, they could have two. Ten years later the researchers tracked down the kids who participated in the study. They found that the kids who were able to resist temptation had a total SAT score that was 210 points higher than those kids who were unable to wait.
IQ, then, mainly predicts what profession an individual can hold a job in—for instance, it takes a certain mental acumen to pass the bar exam or the MCATs. Estimates are that in order to pass the requisite cognitive hurdles such as exams or required coursework or mastery of technical subjects and enter a profession like law, engineering, or senior management, individuals need an IQ in the 110 to 120 range. That means that once one is in the pool of people in a profession, one competes with people who are also at the high end of the bell curve for IQ. This is why, even though IQ is a strong predictor of success among the general population, its predictive power for outstanding performance weakens greatly once the individuals being compared narrow to a pool of people in a given job in an organization, particularly at its higher levels.
In short, the position is that IQ will be a more powerful predictor than EI of individuals’ career success in studies of large populations over the career course because it sorts people before they embark on a career, determining which fields or professions they can enter. But when studies look withina job or profession to learn which individuals rise to the top and which plateau or field, EI should prove a more powerful predictor of success than IQ.
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