A new meta-analysis landed in the Consulting Psychology Journal this spring — Giordano, Ren, and Ones (2026) on emotional intelligence and counterproductive work behavior. This paper is yet another attempt to demonstrate how emotional intelligence, maligned in some spheres, makes a unique contribution to psychology and the business world. This new paper sparked thoughts that sent me back to a paper I had not read carefully in years: Joseph and Newman’s 2010 integrative meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology, still the most rigorous accounting we have of what EI actually predicts.

Read sixteen years apart, they sharpened how I use and think about emotinoal intelligence.  Here are four quick thoughts worth passing along.

 

One: the skeptics were right about the hype, and that is not the same as being right about the construct.

Goleman’s claim that emotional competence matters twice as much as cognitive ability does not survive contact with the data. The 2010 Joseph and Newman paper showed plainly. After all, cognitive ability’s power has been demonstrated again and again.  However, Emotional Intelligence remains a powerful predictor of success in numerous workplace settings. As a construct, it also makes a lot more sense than a variety of unrelated personality and ability traits. To me, Emotional Intelligence is so useful due to its predictive power and ability to make intuitive sense.

 

Two: the overlap with personality is unhelpful for hiring and generative for coaching.

Much of what an EI report tells you, a good personality inventory has already told you. However, you need to be an expert in personality theory to know this. Both papers show that EI is not the best construct to use in hiring decisions. However, once someone is already on your team, emotional intelligence instruments make a large contribution to talent development.

Three: EI inhibits misconduct broadly, not specifically.

The new paper (2026) found that the higher an employee’s emotional intelligence, the less likely they are to engage in counterproductive behaviors across the board. The EI tests simply cannot tell you which problem a given person might drift toward — theft, withdrawal, incivility, sabotage. However, someone with high EI is far less likely to engage in “workplace shenanigans.”

 

Four: Emotional labor determines whether any of this matters.

Where a job requires managing your own emotional display, the ability to regulate emotion meaningfully predicts performance. 

In other words, EI is poor at predicting performance in jobs with minimal interpersonal contact. If an employee makes widgets all day, emotional intelligence is a poor predictor of succcess. However, in jobs that involve working with people, EI is powerful.  Delivering hard feedback, absorbing a team’s anxiety during a reorganization, staying regulated when a board meeting goes sideways — that is the job description.

 

What this means for how I work.

Giordano and colleagues land where I have been landing for years: a hiring process that already measures personality and intelligence gains little from adding EI. Emotional skills can be trained, so the return lives in developing people you have already hired.

So I use the EQ-i 2.0 in coaching, not in screening. Not to sort candidates at the front door, but to give a director who cannot read her own team, or a VP whose composure disappears under pressure, a concrete and measurable place to start — in language they can act on by Thursday.

The critics were right that emotional intelligence was a bit oversold as a totally unique construct apart from personality and intelligence. Certain personality attributes and cognitive abilities share a lot of overlap with emotional intelligence. However, EI is still a powerful construct for predicting job performance in human-facing jobs. It also provides a very helpful framework for analyzing our own strengths and struggles, and for finding ways that teams can work together more effectively.