Emotional intelligence within organizations: A study of emotional intelligence and performance ranking within a biomedical company

Emotional Intelligence (EI) has proved to be more important and valuable than cognitive intelligence. Feelings in the work place are as important as meeting the organizational goals. There are many methods of measuring emotional intelligence, and in this study the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test was utilized to measure the EI scores of employees in a biomedical company in Southern California. Most companies struggle year to year on how to evaluate job performance within their organizations. The biomedical company in this study uses performance forced ranking as a means of ranking employees' performance. The purpose of this research was to explore the possibility that a relationship exists between EI scores and performance forced rankings of employees in a biomedical company. Ninety-eight employees from a biomedical company in Southern California volunteered to participate in this research via 2 internet websites. This research was designed to be quantitative and descriptive.; This study concluded---based upon the findings related to the research objectives---that a large percentage of employees had a low average score for emotional intelligence. Most employees ranked in the exceeds expectations category for the 2005 annual performance forced ranking. A large majority of participants understand why the company uses forced ranking and a smaller majority agree that forced ranking is useful for performance ranking of employees.; Education levels of participants ranged from high school to doctorate degrees. No association existed between force ranking and emotional intelligence scores of employees. No association existed between force ranking and work site, gender, education level, or length of employment. No association existed between emotional intelligence score and work site, age, gender, education level, or length of employment.; If it is true that emotional intelligence is important to employee productivity and employee performance, and allows organizations to be more competitive, then measuring EI would seem important as part of employee performance reviews. The value of measuring emotional intelligence of employees would be to understand those areas of needed improvement and areas of strength. Effective training of EI takes a multi-method approach and needs to include experiential components along with intellectual components.