Emotional Intelligence at the Workplace Emotional Intelligence (EI) has been recently validated with about 25 major skill

areas that can influence your career and create abilities that improve your worth at work. These EI skills are not readily measured on standard intelligence or expertise tests. In fact, EI is quite different from IQ. People with emotional intelligence have tremendous advantages that far outweigh highly intelligent people who may be moody, premadonnas or have temper tantrum ms. These "emotional intelligence" skills can count for far more when it comes to being a "star performer" or excelling at just about any job. To be outstanding, these EI skills are nearly everything for reaching success and the top of any career ladder. In the USA Today article, "Working Smart," author Dr. Daniel Goleman stresses that emotional intelligence is not just being "nice" or giving free rein to feelings so that it "all hangs out." Instead, successful people use their EI to manage feelings both appropriately and effectively so that the common good and goals of the work group can be readily achieved. Each person has a profile of emotional strong and weak point areas. For example, a generality and on the average statement can be made that women are more aware of their emotions, are empathetic and are adept interpersonally. On the average, men appear more self-confident, optimistic, adapt easily, and handle stress better. Goleman reports that there are far more similarities than differences between women and men and there are five major categories with five components each that complete the EI profile. To know your emotional intelligence you need to understand these 25 abilities that matter the most. The five major categories include: Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, Motivation, Empathy, and Social Skills. There are only about two dozen emotional intelligence skills that affect all aspects of work. Some of them are: accurate self-assessment, self-confidence, self-control, conscientiousness, adaptability, innovation, commitment, initiative, political awareness, optimism, understanding others, conflict management skills, team capabilities, communication, and the ability to initiate or manage change. The article cites examples of how important EI is to industry leaders, flight attendants, physicians, managers, and computer programmers. It appears to be especially important for computer programmers who can make a competitive difference with emotional intelligence abilities that help a person to collaborate, (not compete against the team), stay late to help the team members, and share shortcuts to achieving answers. The output of the surveyed top programmers in the USA showed a 1,272 percent more than the average production

return. EI affects output. The good news for everyone is that unlike IQ which does not change much after our teen years, the level of our emotional intelligence can continue to grow, develop and change as it is largely a learned area of expertise. Goleman calls this growth by its old-fashioned word: "maturity." TALKING IT OVER AND THINKING IT THROUGH! 1.Goleman offers twelve questions to ask yourself to see if you work with emotional intelligence. If you answer "yes" to half or more, (and if other people who know you agree with your self-rating) then you are doing okay with your EI. See where you score on these items taken from his emotional intelligence chart. Do you - can you - are you: understand both your strengths and weaknesses? be depended on to take care of every detail? Do you hate to let things slide? comfortable with change and open to novel ideas? motivated by the satisfaction of meeting your own standards of excellence? stay optimistic when things go wrong? see things from another person's point of view and sense what matters most to that person? let customers' needs determine how you serve them? enjoy helping co-workers develop their skills? read office politics accurately? able to find "win-win" solutions in negotiations and conflicts? the kind of person other people want on a team? Do you enjoy collaborating with others? usually persuasive? Add up the number of questions to which you could answer yes. How did you score? Answering yes to six or more of the EI skill items indicates that you are working well and with maturity in the workplace. Do you have more than five questions to which you answered no? Do people who know you well agree with your high number of negative scores? If so, what can you do to change and improve your emotional score? 2.In businesses and workplaces of every kind, a great deal of time has to be spent in meetings. To be effective and productive, these meetings must be carefully planned, skillfully led, and the emotional intelligence of the participants can affect the outcome. What are some things that you need to do as the moderator of the meeting to get all participants to share information and contribute to good decision-making? Remember that the key can be understanding others, political awareness of the emotional currents and power relationships, leveraging diversity, developing others and bolstering their abilities as suggested by Goleman.

3.Another area in which empathy has a play is being a good listener. If you know your emotional intelligence "quotient" needs improvement in your listening ability and that you need to improve your listening habits, what are some of the things you can do to become a "mature" EI listener? What distinguishes good listeners from the bad ones that you may know or have to deal with each day at work? THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE! In the future, employers are going to require emotional intelligence from their workers, especially as these skills become more critical in a global, diverse workplace. Employees will have to participate in team building and use collaborative, emotional intelligence skills that enhance working on shared goals. To get you started in a new emotional intelligence direction, the key is to change what may be just a bad habit. There are proven techniques that really work to modify behavior, which ultimately can change the outcome of your future at both work and home. In "Change Your Bad Habits to Good," the author studied more than 2000 years of self-change concepts and came up with three especially good methods to successfully effect change. "People who have successfully changed their eating habits or career paths often relied on these methods," states Dr. Robert Epstein, United States International University at San Diego professor. Epstein calls them the "Three M's. Briefly, they are: Modify your environment, Monitor your behavior, and Make commitments. People, who change their self, change their world, or "stimulus environment." If you become more aware of what you are doing wrong -let's say an annoying bad habit - and start self-monitoring yourself, you can start to perform positively. Just writing down on a piece of paper each time you misbehave or misspeak can make you focus on changing behavior. Another powerful aid to developing those EI skill areas that you may want to reinforce is to make a commitment to another person, who in turn, will put pressure on you when you don't comply with the area in need of improvement. The really happy news with emotional intelligence maturity building is that we can meet and master improvements in EI with skill techniques not just will power. DIGGING DEEPER! If you are intrigued by the idea that we can change and enhance our emotional intelligence and increase our capacity for job output, earnings, security, and sales, you might want to read Daniel Goleman's book entitled, Working With Emotional Intelligence. Workplace expertise is more than the ability to technically operate equipment, especially as we move toward a service industry economy. A new EI quotient inventory test has recently been validated and become available in the past few

months. Researcher Reuven BarOn has discovered 15 factors that allow psychologists to measure EI. What is significant about his work is that it takes the guesswork out of trying to figure out what is going wrong when a person is unable to respond effectively to a problem. If you are interested in your ability to guide your emotional responses to those events that happen in your life so that you can act upon your emotions in an effective manner, you may want to take the BarOn Emotional Quotient Inventory Test. Dr. Tom Muha, director of psychology and co-director of The Counseling and Relationship Enhancement Center in Annapolis, MD, discussed in detail on October 1, 1998, the BarOn Inventory in his psychology column for The Capitol Online, a supplemental version of the paper published on the Internet. SOURCES: Goleman, Daniel. "Working Smart." USA Weekend, October 2-4, 1998, pp. 4-5. Epstein, Robert. "Change Your Bad Habits to Good." Reader's Digest, October 1998, pp. 25-30

Emotional Intelligence in the Nursing Profession

Emotional Intelligence Emotional Intelligence often referred also as Emotional Intelligence Quotient is the ability of an individual to perceive, assess and manage emotions of his own self and of other people. Salovey and Mayer (1990) define Emotional Intelligence as the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions. Emotional Intelligence has four main components, namely, the ability to: 1.Perceive emotions; 2.Utilize these emotional perceptions to accomplish various activities or tasks; 3.Understand emotional variations;and 4. Manage emotions to achieve goals. Thus, Emotional Intelligence is a measure of an individual's capability and requires tools to assess this capability. This includes the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), The Emotional Competency Inventory (ECI) and the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal (Bradberry and Greaves, 2005) based on Goleman's model of emotional intelligence, The Bar-On Emotion Quotient Inventory-EQ-I (Reuven Bar-On,2006), The Swinburne University Emotional Intelligence Test (SUEIT), the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment (SEI) and the Schutte SelfReport Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT) based on the Trait EI model (Petrides and Furnham, 2000). Emotional Intelligence in Nursing Profession The nursing profession demands that the nurse, in the process of care, has to interact with the patients, the medical fraternity and the health care workers constantly. Hence, "Nurse-Patient Interaction" is the pulse of the nursing practice. This interaction is not just conversation. It is a complex process that involves nurse perception, understanding of the patient emotions and utilization of the perceptions to manage patient situations towards the goal of effective patient care. This involves Emotional Intelligence. The concept of emotional intelligence has grown in popularity among nurses over the last two decades, generating interest both at a social and a professional level (Dawn Freshwater and Theodore Stickley, 2004). Today, patient care not only includes quality medical care but also a care concept that encompasses respecting patient's goals, preferences and choices, obliging their emotional, social and spiritual needs using the strengths of interdisciplinary resources. Many patients suffer only when they do not receive adequate care for the symptoms accompanying their serious illness. Thus, care cannot be confined to the physical aliment but also the psychological and spiritual needs. Hence, the role of Emotional Intelligence in the nursing profession should be viewed in two dimensions: 1) The Nurse's perception and understanding of the patient's emotions, and 2) The Nurse's utilization of these perceptions to achieve the goal of managing complex situations towards quality patient care. Nurses should develop skills to assess patient's responses to the illness. This requires active selfintrospection of the events, assessment of the events, psychological understanding of the patients and above all a genuine concern for the ill. The perception cannot be universal in the sense that every patient differs and has different attitudes on various issues of life and has varied levels of understanding and withstanding capabilities. It should be recognized that the nurses are confronted not only by the patient emotions but also their

own. This is especially true in situations where some patients will die despite the best efforts due to diseases like cancer and HIV or various other factors. Nurse have to confront and manage their own emotions also in situations, where, some terminally ill patients request for assistance for suicide in states like Oregon, which have a legal back up for physician assisted deaths. Factors That Influence Nurse Application Of Emotional Intelligence The gender, age and health condition of patients also influences the application of Emotional Intelligence. For example, it is difficult to interact to an old patient whose hearing capacity would be at a reasonably low level or whose perception has diminished due to aging. Research studies pertaining to factors related to nurse interactions with elderly people have shown that the educational level of nurses influenced nurse interactions with elderly patients (Wilma et.al, 1999). Non-verbal interactions play a vital role in nurse-patient perceptions. The non-verbal interactions include patient-directed eye gaze, affirmative head nod, smiling, learning forward, touch and instrumental touch (Wilma, 1999). Advantages of Application Of Emotional Intelligence in Nursing Practice Studies conducted to examine the role of perceived emotional intelligence (PEI) measured by the Trait Meta-Mood Scale, in the use of stress-coping strategies, in the quantity and quality of social support and in the mental health of nursing students have shown that emotional intelligence minimizes the negative stress consequences (Montes & Augusto ,2007). Anne (2004), by a literature review concludes that the modern day demands of nursing depend on the skills of emotional intelligence to achieve a patient centered care. There is no doubt that Emotional intelligence in nursing leads to more positive attitudes, greater adaptability, improved relationships and increased orientation towards positive values (Kristin and Elisabeth, 2007). A clear relation between emotional intelligence and adaptive success has been detected in nurses caring for people with mental retardation. The study conducted with 180 Dutch nurses using the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory, Utrecht-Coping List, Utrecht-Burnout Scale, MMPI-2, and GAMA has revealed the importance of emotional intelligence in reducing nurse burnout (Linda Gerits et.al, 2004). A similar study with mental health nurses has found that Emotional Intelligence stimulates the search for a deeper understanding of a professional mental health nursing identity (Kristin and Elisabeth, 2004). The study has highlighted the nurse relationship with the patient, supervision, motivation and responsibility as important factors in Emotional Intelligence.Humpel & Caputi (2001), have found a significant relationship between emotional competency and nurse's years of experience with the relationship in direct proportion. Conclusion It should be recognized that emotional competencies are not mere innate talents, but learned capabilities that must be developed to achieve outstanding performance (Goleman, 2001). Nursing empathy, the ability of the nurse to perceive and reason, as well as the capacity to interact are seen as core characteristics of a nurse to build relationship with the ill (Reynolds et.al, 2000) towards care. Dawn Freshwater and Theodore Stickley (2004) suggest that emotional intelligence should be more realistically and appropriately integrated into the nursing profession by a model of transformatory learning for nurse education.Today,emotional intelligence is probed as an important characteristic for building successful nursing leadership (Vitello-Cicciu,2002), enhancing nursing performance and reducing nurse burnout. References Anne C.H.McQueen.(2004). Emotional intelligence in nursing work Journal of Advanced Nursing. Journal of Advanced Nursing.47(1);101-108.

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Incremental Validity in a French-Speaking Population. Journal of Personality Assessment, 88(3), 338-353 . Montes-Berges & Augusto.(2007). Exploring the relationship between perceived emotional intelligence, coping, social support and mental health in nursing students. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. 14 (2);163-171. N. Humpel & P. Caputi.(2001). Exploring the relationship between work stress, years of experience and emotional competency using a sample of Australian mental health nurses. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing .8 (5): 399-403. Parker JDA, Taylor GJ, Bagby RM (2001). "The Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence and Alexithymia". Personality and Individual Differences 30, 107-115 . Payne, W.L. (1983/1986). A study of emotion: developing emotional intelligence; self integration; relating to fear, pain and desire. Dissertation Abstracts International, 47, p. 203A. (University microfilms No. AAC 8605928) . Petrides, K. V. & Furnham, A. (2000a). On the dimensional structure of emotional intelligence. Personality and Individual Differences, 29, 313-320 . Petrides, K. V. & Furnham, A. (2001). Trait emotional intelligence: Psychometric investigation with reference to established trait taxonomies. European Journal of Personality, 15, 425-448. Petrides, K. V., & Furnham, A. (2003). Trait emotional intelligence: behavioral validation in two studies of emotion recognition and reactivity to mood induction. European Journal of Personality, 17, 39-75 . Salovey P and Grewal D (2005) The Science of Emotional Intelligence. Current directions in psychological science, Volume 14-6. Salovey, P. & Mayer, J.D. (1990) "Emotional intelligence" Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 9, 185-211 . Smith, M. K. (2002) "Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences", the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm on October 31, 2005. Snow, Janet L. (2001). Looking Beyond Nursing for Clues to Effective Leadership. Journal of Nursing Administration. 31(9): 440-443. Taylor, Graeme J; Bagby, R. Michael and Parker, James DA (1997). Disorders of Affect Regulation: Alexithymia in Medical and Psychiatric Illness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres. ISBN 052145610X. pp.28-31. Thorndike, R.K. (1920). "Intelligence and Its Uses", Harper's Magazine 140, 227-335. Vitello-Cicciu, Joan M. (2002). Exploring Emotional Intelligence: Implications for Nursing Leaders. Journal of Nursing Administration. 32(4): 203-210. Vitello-Cicciu, Joan. (2003). Innovative Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence. Nursing Management. 34(10): 28-32