Emotional intelligence was first mentioned in a 1990 scientific paper by Salovey and Mayer (source Wikipedia). The concept received limited attention until the release of Daniel Goleman’s sacred book in 1995. A hype was born. After a few years, that hype blew over, but even so, the concept of EQ still comes up occasionally in HR land.
Assessment agencies regularly received questions about measuring EQ in the late 1990s. Often, HR had picked up something about an EQ test. The suggestion was made that EQ could be measured in the same way as IQ. With IQ, ability or giftedness is measured by having a candidate process information under time pressure. Preferably neutral, meaningless information so that components of knowledge are not inadvertently measured.
Psychometric robustness of EQ
Although EQ was also an interesting concept from an assessment perspective because it also added new psychological traits such as emotional self-awareness, self-esteem, self-actualization, social responsibility, reality check, flexibility, optimism, and happiness to what was common in the assessment industry, there was a firm measurement technical problem. The main cause was that these constructs were measured in the same way as personality traits, via self-descriptive questions. That reliance on self-description and the associated sensitivity to social desirability were the Achilles’ heels.
The psychometric robustness that can be achieved with an IQ or ability test did not appear to be within reach.
When it became clear in the assessment industry that EQ had such an emphatic overlap with personality, and we were still in the midst of the hype, most test publishers came up with a reporting capability to translate to EQ based on their personality questionnaires and thus serve their clients with their existing test systems.
EQ as a development tool
Now, 20 years after the hype, we can conclude that EQ is still used only to a limited extent in assessment countries. The current demand for EQ assessment comes primarily from the not-for-profit sector and actually always has a development background, often aimed at assessing the fitness of a population of employees. In recent years, we have seen the demand for learning agility assessments displace even this demand for EQ assessments.
Both the EQ assessment and the Learning Agility assessment have found a place in an employee’s career (development) phase. EQ testing in the recruitment phase is actually no longer required. We see that recruitment support assessments are almost always designed from a job description, job analysis, or competency modeling.
