Neuroscience and Leadership

In his critique of the application of neuroscience to leadership, and especially the use of neurological indicators to predict and select leaders, Lindebaum (2013) makes the point that, despite the developing interest in the concept, there are a raft of problematical issues, both methodologically and morally. I agree with this conclusion. I also agree with Lindebaum’s assertion that what Ringleb and Rock (2008, p. 3) referred to as “NeuroLeadership” is becoming a new management fad. Nonetheless, having written extensively on emotional intelligence, cited as a “management fad,” I would like to issue a warning here that scholars must take care not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater. ” To illustrate the issue here, let’s take a closer look at emotional intelligence. For practical purposes, the psychological construct of emotional intelligence was introduced to the mainstream psychology 22 years ago by Salovey and Mayer (1990). Mayer and Salovey (1997) subsequently refined the construct, and defined it in terms of four “branches”: (a) perceiving emotions, (b) assimilating emotional information in thought processes, (c) understanding emotion, and (d) managing emotions in self and others. Subsequently, together with consultant David Caruso, Mayer and Salovey developed a 141-item IQ-style “ability” measure of emotion, called the MSCEIT (Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002). In Jordan, Ashton-James, and Ashkanasy (2006), my coauthors and I referred to this measure as the “gold standard” in the field. Shortly after Mayer and Salovey introduced the idea of emotional intelligence, New York Times’ social sciences columnist Daniel Goleman, after learning about it from its application in preschool education, published his popular book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (Goleman, 1995). The book became a bestseller and was featured on the cover of Time Magazine (Gibbs, 1995). At this point, emotional intelligence had morphed from academic construct to management fad, defined by Gibson and Tesone (2001) as “widely accepted, innovative interventions into the organization’s practices designed to improve some aspect of performance. Fads evolve into new management practices or are abandoned as failures” (p. 122). Two further characteristic of fads are the following: (a) They result in a welter of overblown claims (see Jordan et al., 2006) and (b) they spawn a plethora of measures, usually of dubious validity. For example, after reading Goleman’s (1995) book, a recently graduated doctoral student from South Africa saw a commercial opportunity in a measure he had developed for his dissertation work on clinical emotional competency. He quickly contacted a commercial test distributor, renamed his measure the “EQ-i” (Bar-On, 1997), and began to market it aggressively, to the point that it is now one of the more widely used commercial measures of emotional intelligence. The problem here, of course, is that the EQ-i is based on a definition of emotional intelligence that is quite different from the Mayer and Salovey (1997) definition of the construct. In Ashkanasy and Daus (2005), we referred to measures like this (and there are many of them), as Stream 3 measures. This is to distinguish them from the Stream 1 measure (the MSCEIT) and Stream 2 measures (based on Mayer & Salovey, 1997, but using a self or peer-report format, for example, Brackett, Rivers, Shiffman, Lerner, & Salovey, 2006). The net effect on the field of all the different definitions and measures of emotional intelligence, not to mention the overblown claims, has been obfuscation and resistance. Consequently, we find leading scholars of industrial and organizational psychology such as Landy (2005) and Locke (2005) totally repudiating the whole idea of emotional intelligence. In a recent debate article (Antonakis, Ashkanasy, & Dasborough, 2009, p. 256), protagonist Antonakis goes so far as to claim that emotional intelligence “looks like g” (where g is a symbol of unified intellectual intelligence). Like Locke, Antonakis rejects the whole concept of emotional intelligence. This is what I mean by “throwing the baby out with the bathwater. ” Unfortunately, many of my colleagues hold similar views of the construct. As Dasborough and I make clear in our contributions to Antonakis et al. (2009), however, the idea of emotional intelligence is not really a big deal. The discipline of psychology is largely grounded in the idea of individual differences. 478519 JMIXXX10.1177/105649261347851 9Journal of Management InquiryAshkanasy