Question

On March 12, 2009, a former chief of the New York Stock Exchange pled guilty to one of the largest financial frauds in history. Bernie Madoff, founder of his own financial firm and active philanthropist, had been swindling thousands of private investors—many of whom were close friends—out of billions of dollars. Madoff had achieved a degree of personal financial success few individuals ever attain, though he will be spending the rest of his life in prison. Would you consider Madoff an intelligent person? What role might emotional intelligence have played in his decision making?

For this Discussion, you define intelligence and detail its components. You also take a position on whether or not emotional intelligence is an accurate measure of intelligence.

With these thoughts in mind:

Post

a brief definition of intelligence, including the main components of intelligence.

Then provide your position on whether or not emotional intelligence is an accurate measure of intelligence.

Justify your response.

Answer 1

• “Intelligence is the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally and to deal effectively with his environment (Wechsler)
• Intelligence involves the level of ability to do the following:
• Learn: The acquisition, retention, and use of knowledge is an important component of intelligence.
• Recognize problems: To put knowledge to use, people must be able to identify possible problems in the environment that need to be addressed.
• Solve problems: People must then be able to take what they have learned to come up with a useful solution to a problem they have noticed in the world around them.
• Intelligence involves some different mental abilities including logic, reasoning, problem-solving, and planning.
• Intelligence includes the ability to benefit from past experience, act purposefully, solve problems, and adapt to new situations. Intelligence can also be defined as “the ability that intelligence tests measure.
• Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others.
• More popular criticisms of Emotional Intelligence is whether or not it has the ability to generate any accurate predictions regarding an individual's success, although most models claim they do have varying predictive value.
• Some of the research that seems to support some predictive value within Emotional Intelligence may make accurate predictions, according to these critics, but they may be predicting things not based on a genuine idea of Emotional Intelligence, so much as on personality characteristics that could have been predicted using a personality assessment, rather then being a genuinely unique to the EQ concept.
  
• The easiest way to measure EQ is through what are called self-report questionnaires, although these are probably the weakest way to do it. These questionnaires ask you to report on your abilities, skills, and behaviors - for example, how effective you are in recognizing emotions, understanding emotions, etc. The flaw in this approach is that you may not accurately report your own skills and abilities.
• Most of us have a tendency to exaggerate our accomplishments and minimize our shortcomings. The result is that self-report questionnaires often provide an inflated picture of our skills and abilities. Even if you were to be completely honest in your answers, you may lack the necessary insight to give accurate ones.
• The use of psychological measurement has always been rather controversial, and the measurement of emotional intelligence is no different. This may be due to the view that emotions are unpredictable, irrational, and something to be suppressed in favor of logic and reason.
• The use of emotional intelligence assessment in organizations has also been controversial. The definition of emotional competencies and the subsequent focus on work performance and assessment has led some critics to label the whole process as a return to an outmoded mechanistic way to increase performance and efficacy at the expense of the well-being of individual employees.
• However, the core principles of emotional intelligence make clear that individuals are a complex combination of emotion and reason. Without a specific theory of emotional intelligence and the methods to assess it, employees may be limited to vague criticism related to their 'people skills.'
• In order to improve on any emotional competence, people need to see quantifiable measurement of their baseline abilities and any improvement from it.
• In conclusion, reliable and valid measurement of specific emotional competencies, so long as it is provided in a positive way, helps to provide employees with insight into their strengths and areas for development.