The Power of EI Competencies Over Intelligence and Individual Performance: A Task-Dependent Model.

Prior research on emotional intelligence (EI) has highlighted the use of incremental models that assume EI and general intelligence (or ) make independent contributions to performance. Questioning this assumption, we study EI's moderation power over the relationship between and individual performance, by designing and testing a task-dependent interaction model. Reconciling divergent findings in previous studies, we propose that whenever social tasks are at stake, has a greater effect on performance as EI increases. By contrast, in analytic tasks, a compensatory (or negative) interaction is expected, whereby at higher levels of EI, contributes to performance at a lesser extent. Based on a behavioral approach to EI, using 360-degree assessments of EI competencies, our findings show that EI moderates the effect of on the classroom performance of 864 MBA business executives. Whilst in analytic tasks has a stronger effect on performance at lower levels of EI competencies, our data comes short to show a positive interaction of EI and in affecting performance on social tasks. Contributions and implications to research and practice are discussed.