What type of educational activities benefit most from cognitive intelligence, and which benefit most from emotional intelligence and emotional competencies? Provide evidence from the studies covered in the text.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Emotional competencies may also help people do well in school, especially when it comes
to leading teams. Offerman, Bailey, Vasilopoulos, Seal, and Sass (2004) studied which is more important to classroom performance: cognitive intelligence or emotional competency. They found that which is most important depends on the class assignment. They used the ECI-U (Boyatzis & Goleman, 2002) to measure emotional competencies and SAT scores to assess cognitive ability. Interestingly, the total SAT scores predicted the individual exam grades, but the ECI scores did not. In contrast, the ECI score was a good predictor of the team project grade, but the SAT was not significantly related to the team project grade. Moreover, the ECI predicted both leadership effectiveness ratings and leadership rankings. Interestingly, the total SAT scores
did not correlate significantly with either leadership scale. However, SAT math scores were
negatively related to leadership effectiveness scores, while SAT verbal scores were positively related to leadership effectiveness and also were correlated with rankings. These results suggest that for solitary activities that are primarily cognitive in nature—like studying for exams—cognitive intelligence is the best predictor. For group projects and activities that require leadership skills, however, emotional competency may be of equal or greater importance.
Other researchers also found that emotional intelligence was important in student project
teams (CÔté, Lopes, Salovey, & Miners, 2010). These researchers found that emotional intelligence (as measured by the MSCEIT) was a better predictor of leadership emergence than cognitive intelligence or any of the Big Five personality measures.