Emotional Intelligence and the DISC Model of Personality

I just finished reading an interesting meta-review of the research on Emotional Intelligence and job performance in the January 2010 Journal of Applied Psychology. In the article they laid out the well-accepted model of emotional intelligence, defined as “the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions”. The article presented a cascading model of three ability factors affecting job performance in a sequential fashion: emotion perception, emotion understanding, and emotion regulation.

The researchers highlighted the impact of emotion regulation on job performance because it the ability is used to induce positive emotional states that are beneficial to performance because they broaden behavioral repertoires, improve behavioral flexibility and increase attentional scope. In addition to the production of positive emotional states, emotional regulation also includes the suppression of negative emotional states. Individual with greater emotional regulation ability can use a more effective strategy for managing negative emotional than suppression (which has a high energy cost) by using strategies such as cognitive reappraisal.

The discussion of resource allocation theory caught my attention because it is something we have talked about for several years when we talk about the true energy cost of adaptive behavior and the impact of such an energy drain on the resources available for task performance. They also noted that people high in emotion regulation ability will be able to match their chosen regulation strategy to the demands of the task and to the momentary store of personal resources at hand, to maintain overall job performance. (Of course, emotion regulation ability is preceded by two supporting abilities: the ability to perceive emotion and the ability to understand emotion.)

This is where I see the power of our DiSC tools in helping people increase their emotional understanding of self and others, and broaden their repertoire of adaptive responses so that they can chose a strategy that matches the demands of the situation and their available personal resources.

Next: Assessing the personal cost of emotional labor

Advertisement