In today’s hypercompetitive world, it is more important than ever to have highly engaged, committed workers. Employees with high job satisfaction and organisational commitment have higher job performance. Satisfied people are more productive. Moreover, employees with high job satisfaction and organisational commitment have lower turnover intentions. This can keep costly turnover down and help organisations retain knowledgeable, well-trained, and experienced staff.

People with high job satisfaction also have better physical and mental health, and this is good for both the employees and the company, keeping down absenteeism and reducing health insurance costs.

The multiple benefits of job satisfaction raise the question: What leads to satisfied employees? While a variety of personality traits are related to job satisfaction, our research provides compelling evidence that emotional intelligence is the most important personality predictor of job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and turnover intentions. Organisations that recruit emotionally intelligent employees will have an advantage over the competition. Moreover, because emotional competencies and skills can be developed, our research suggests practical ways that organisations can use to increase their existing employees’ job satisfaction, commitment, and productivity.

What is emotional intelligence?

We all know people who intuitively understand the feelings of those around them. Likewise, we have certainly encountered those who have trouble understanding our feelings even when we directly tell them what we are thinking and feeling. The former have high emotional intelligence, the ability to recognise and understand their own and others’ emotions, while the latter are low on this crucial life skill. We also know people who can keep control of their emotions during crises, when dealing with difficult people, and when encountering an assortment of problems and frustrations. These people are high on the emotion regulation aspects of emotional intelligence. In contrast, you have probably also encountered people who “fly off the handle” and lose their temper, their composure, or their confidence at the slightest provocation or setback. Sadly, these people are low on the ability to regulate their emotions.

There are different ways of assessing emotional intelligence, some with objective items, just like IQ tests do. Other researchers use self-report measures or self-report mixed emotional competencies scales, and they may regard emotional intelligence as a type of personality trait or as a set of emotion-related competencies and skills.

Researchers have spent decades trying to find out what motivates employees and keeps them happy and satisfied. They have explored a wide variety of personality traits, and made various claims as to which ones are most important.

Personality traits are often grouped into five major dimensions, called the Big Five:

  • conscientiousness (a work ethic),
  • agreeableness,
  • neuroticism (labelled at the other end of the scale as emotional stability),
  • openness (to new experiences, ideas, cultures, etc.), and
  • extroversion-introversion

Sceptics have claimed that emotional intelligence wouldn’t explain much once the Big Five traits are taken into account. To settle these disputes, we conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis, or statistical summary, of the research on emotional intelligence, and combined it with the large-scale studies on the Big Five personality traits and job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and turnover intentions. We also included in our study the effects of cognitive intelligence on these three work attitudes.

Although we expected that emotional intelligence would be important, we were surprised by how large the effects of emotional intelligence were when compared to the other variables. When using the most popular ways to measure emotional intelligence (self-report scales and self-report mixed competencies), we found that emotional intelligence was the most important of the traits when predicting all three work attitudes, and was more important than cognitive intelligence as well. Self-report emotional intelligence measures accounted for 31 per cent of the total influence on employee job satisfaction, 47 per cent of the effects on organisational commitment, and a whopping 61 per cent of the effects on turnover intentions.

For turnover intentions, emotional intelligence was more important than cognitive intelligence and the Big Five variables put together. For organisational commitment, it was only slightly less than the other variables put together and far more than any other single one. The self-report emotional intelligence measures doubled the ability of researchers to predict turnover intentions, thus showing its considerable practical importance.

We also wanted to know how emotional intelligence has such powerful effects on employees’ attitudes. One way might be by increasing employees’ job performance, since employees who do well at work are more likely to receive praise and other rewards, feel competent at their job, and overall be more satisfied. A prior study found that emotional intelligence did indeed boost employees’ job performance over and above what could be accounted for by the Big Five traits and cognitive intelligence. So, we tested whether the emotional intelligence → job performance→ job satisfaction relationship explained some of the effects of emotional intelligence on job satisfaction. Sure enough, the statistical analyses supported this interpretation.

We also thought that emotional intelligence would help employees maintain better moods at work. Psychologists referred to the moods that people currently feel as “state affect,” and state affect can range from intensely negative emotions to highly positive ones. The workplace can be filled with frustrating events, and emotional intelligence can help people maintain positive state affect when encountering these problems, and experience more positive emotions during normal times as well. Thus, we hypothesised that emotional intelligence ­→ state affect→ job satisfaction. Again, the statistical data supported this hypothesis.

Our other studies also found that emotional intelligence increases organisational citizenship behaviour and reduces counterproductive work behaviours, and that leaders high on emotional intelligence have employees with higher job satisfaction. In conclusion, if organisations want highly satisfied, committed employees with high job performance, then they should recruit emotionally intelligent employees, and train all employees in emotional competencies.



Ronald H. Humphrey is Distinguished Professor of leadership in the Lancaster University Management School, and director of the Centre for Leadership Studies and Practice. He wrote Effective Leadership: Theories, Cases, and Applications (2014, Sage). He previously edited a special issue of The Leadership Quarterly on emotions, and he co-edited a 2017 special issue of the Academy of Management Review on emotions and management. He is a member of the leadership team for the Consortium for Research on Emotions in Organizations, and a founding member of the Network of Leadership Scholars and EMONET—Emotions Network.

Chao Miao is an assistant professor of management in the Department of Management and Marketing, Franklin P. Perdue School of Business, Salisbury University. He received his Ph.D. in Management from Virginia Commonwealth University. He was also awarded the Graduate Dean’s Scholar Award from Virginia Commonwealth University. His co-authored publication at Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice has won the Emerald Group Publishing Citation of Excellence Award. His research interests include entrepreneurship, emotion, leadership, personality, cross-culture, and meta-analysis.

Shanshan Qian is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship in the Department of Management, College of Business and Economics, Towson University. She received her PhD degree in Entrepreneurship from University of Louisville. She was also awarded the Graduate Dean’s Citation Award for her doctoral study at University of Louisville. Her co-authored publication at Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice has won the Emerald Group Publishing Citation of Excellence Award. Her research interests include opportunity discovery, decision making, business ethics, emotional intelligence, and entrepreneurial spawning.