Richard E. Boyatzis

Case Western Reserve University | CWRU · Department of Organizational Behavior

Purpose Modern careers are marked by periods of feeling betwixt, or “in-between,” – yet, there is no validated measure of this experience, recognized as subjective liminality. The present research aims to (1) operationalize subjective liminality and (2) develop and validate a scale to measure it. Design/methodology/approach A literature review was...

Coaching as a practice and process has grown. Coach training and certification is currently based on competency models derived from opinion surveys not research on coaching outcomes. Competency models developed on expert opinion were about 50% accurate in terms of predicting managerial effectiveness in prior studies. To address this gap, we tested...

Desirable change may appear chaotic, slow, or not sustainable. We may expect linear, continuous change, but it eludes us. Measurement and statistical analysis about behavior change often requires data showing continuity and having normal (i.e., Gaussian) distributions. When we encounter phenomenon that does not fit this expectation, we seek to tran...

Emotional intelligence (EI) is a Research Topic of increasing interest over the past couple of decades due to growing evidence that EI can be learned and is a key component of quality leadership (Boyatzis and McKee, 2005). For example, we have known for some time that EI competencies improve performance and work organizational outcomes (Sy et al.,...

In this chapter, the author shares his experience of motivating others to learn and change. The ultimate challenge for leaders is how to motivate people to learn and change. It starts with themselves. Sadly, most leaders focus on the tasks and problems at hand. Then, they attempt to motivate others by increasing the pressure or incentives to change...

The popularity of coaching as a development activity in organizations has outpaced the research. To inspire research and strengthen our intellectual foundation, the Thought Leadership Institute of the International Coaching Federation invited 35 of the most recognized coaching scholars and 12 coaching leaders to three two-hour discussions. Each ses...

Purpose The ideal self has had a place in management literature in recent years with reference to identity and role change. However, except for a JMD article in 2006, there has been little theorizing on the ideal self, which is often treated as a static construct. The purpose of this article is to update and refine the concept and explain the dynam...

Research about stress management has traditionally focused on reducing possible stressors. However, more recent studies have highlighted the importance of renewal as an antidote to stress. The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical explanation of how renewal activities can invoke a psycho-physiological response that enhances personal sus...

Individuals are subject to stressful events from daily chronic stress to traumatic life-changing experiences and the resulting impairment. Efforts to reduce stress or stressors are misdirected. Instead, bouncing back or recovering from such experiences, often called resilience is a far more potent way to ameliorate the ravages of chronic stress and...

This study explores the efficacy of a specific tool – the articulation of the ideal self – in job engagement, psychological well-being, and organizational citizenship behavior. We hypothesized that employees who can visualize their jobs as part of their ideal self – in particular how it helps in its development and realization – would feel higher l...

Stress is overwhelmingly present in our lives. Although we need stress to survive, many of us experience too much of it, which contributes to a loss of engagement at work, compromises our immune system, and limits our cognitive functioning. Although extensive research has focused on the causes and consequences of stress, little research has taken a...

David C. McClelland was an internationally recognized, motivation psychologist because of his profound research into achievement, affiliation, and power and his commitment to applying the findings to enhance people's lives and society. He led efforts to develop entrepreneurs in dozens of countries of the world, many in developing economics. He appl...

Social intelligence (SI) is the ability to live, love, and work with others. SI has been shown to predict effectiveness in leadership and professional jobs, and life satisfaction. The concept of building better relationships has been around for thousands of years. Full understanding of SI includes examining its multiple levels, from neural networks...

Social intelligence (SI) is the ability to live, love, and work with others. SI has been shown to predict effectiveness in leadership and professional jobs, and life satisfaction. The concept of building better relationships has been around for thousands of years. Full understanding of SI includes examining its multiple levels, from neural networks...

David C. McClelland was an internationally recognized, motivation psychologist because of his profound research into achievement, affiliation, and power and his commitment to applying the findings to enhance people's lives and society. He led efforts to develop entrepreneurs in dozens of countries of the world, many in developing economics. He appl...

This second edition of the Handbook provides a comprehensive examination of lifelong learning. With 38 chapters (12 new and 23 updated), the approach is interdisciplinary, spanning human resources development, adult learning (educational perspective), psychology, career and vocational learning, management and executive development, cultural anthrop...

Emotional, social, and cognitive intelligence competencies have been recognized as the most critical capabilities for organizations to acquire at all levels. For this reason, a wide body of research since the 1980s has demonstrated their positive impact on individual performance, career success, and wellbeing across sectors and professional roles,...

This article advances the literature that has recently drawn attention to the intangible elements of human capital for innovation, investigating the relationship between behavioral competencies and the ability to attain different types of innovation, namely product, process, marketing, and organizational. Through a study of a sample of managers per...

Relationships are the fundamental building blocks of organizations, yet the field lacks a validated and comprehensive measure of how employees perceive the quality of the relationships in their organization. In this paper, we develop and validate a scale to measure the perceived relational climate in an organization. We operationalize relational cl...

Leaders matter to organizational performance and adaptability. Effective leaders matter the most in a dramatic and positive manner. This chapter is really about the role of intelligence in leadership, not the claim that the capability to be an effective leader is a distinct individual characteristic or a type of intelligence. Intelligent leadership...

Emotional and social intelligence competencies predict outstanding leadership across a variety of professions. The successful incident commander plays a number of roles at different points in time-as executive, as innovator, as teacher, and as pastor. Emotional self-control, adaptability, empathy, coaching and mentoring, and inspirational leadershi...

Effective leadership of wildland fire operations requires paying careful attention to the fire itself and to relationships both internal and external to the incident. At the center of the action is the incident commander (IC), who must integrate her or his skill in managing the technical aspects of wildland fire operations with relationship managem...

Issues surrounding business complexity plague organizations throughout the world. This situation is particularly true of the numerous complex projects and programs upon which organizations embark on a regular basis. Current project management processes and standards are based on Newtonian/Cartesian principles, such as linearity, reductionism, and s...

Multisource assessment (MSA) is based on the belief that assessments are valid inferences about an individual’s behavior. When used for performance management purposes, convergence of views among raters is important, and therefore testing factor invariance across raters is critical. However, when MSA is used for development purposes, raters usually...

Prior research on emotional intelligence (EI) has highlighted the use of incremental models that assume EI and general intelligence (or g) make independent contributions to performance. Questioning this assumption, we study EI's moderation power over the relationship between g and individual performance, by designing and testing a task-dependent in...

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is now widely used in organizations and graduate schools with an increase in published research supporting it. Discussion about EI whether based on measures or theory has given little distinction as to behavioral EI (i.e., how does EI appear in a person’s actions). This results in spurious conflicts about the validity of...

A number of social, emotional, and cognitive competencies have been shown to predict management, professional, and leadership effectiveness. Can these competencies be developed through graduate management education? This chapter provides an update on the 25-year empirical investigation conducted at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western...

Prior research on emotional intelligence (EI) has highlighted the use of incremental models that assume EI and general intelligence (or g) make independent contributions to performance. Questioning this assumption, we study EI’s moderation power over the relationship between g and individual performance, by designing and testing a task-dependent in...

Neuroscience can shed light on the underlying mechanisms of coaching and provide important insights to facilitate development. These insights provide guideposts for a more effective, interactive coaching process that is most successful when it remains fluid, responsive, and centered on the client. In this article we introduce our general model, int...

Retirement is a time of life that has grown ever longer in the developed world, and the number of pensioners has increased accordingly, questioning the strength of Social Security systems and the social safety net in general. Financial Planning for Retirement (FRP) consists of the series of activities involved in the accumulation of wealth to cover...

This chapter provides an overview of how a leadership competency approach grounded in emotional and social intelligence can help educators promote career readiness for students. Strategies and approaches for building leadership competencies will be reviewed.

Incident Management Teams (IMTs) combat the toughest wildfires in the United States, contending with forces of nature as well as many stakeholders with different agendas. Prior literature on IMTs suggested roles and cognitive sensemaking as key elements for success, but the possible importance of emotional and social intelligence competencies in le...

Graduate management education seeks to enhance the likelihood that graduates will be effective leaders, managers, or professionals. This requires programs that are designed to enable students to develop the related competencies, and increasing regulatory pressures require programs to document evidence of success. However, both the design of compete...

In this article, we explore the implications of opposing domains theory for developing ethical leaders. Opposing domains theory highlights a neurological tension between analytic reasoning and socioemotional reasoning. Specifically, when we engage in analytic reasoning (the task positive network), we suppress our ability to engage in socioemotional...

The potential of neuroscience to be a viable framework for studying human behavior in organizations depends on scholars’ ability to evaluate, design, analyze, and accurately interpret neuroscientific research. Prior to the publishing of this special issue, relatively little guidance has been available in the management literature for scholars seeki...

This session presented theoretical and empirically grounded insight about how emotional intelligence measures in the workplace can assist organizations in terms of performance. Topics included literature defining emotional intelligence, explaining how emotional intelligence is measured, used/misused in organizations, and insight from those using em...

Purpose Little research has explored the importance of interpersonal skills, and more specifically, emotional and social intelligence (ESI) competencies for an engineer’s effectiveness or engagement. Furthermore, to the knowledge, no studies have explored the explanatory power of ESI over and above general mental ability and personality for enginee...

In his review of the literature on models and measures of emotional intelligence (EI), Ackley (2016) did not include enhancements to the Emotional Competency Inventory (ECI) since 2006, when it was revised and renamed the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI). In 2006, the test was substantially revised and improved. The ESCI reflects th...

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Prior work has established that analytic thinking is associated with disbelief in God, whereas religious and spiritual beliefs have been positively linked to social and emotional cognition. However, social and emotional cognition can be subdivided into a number of distinct dimensions, and some work suggests that analytic thinking is in tension with...

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The fundamental principle of emotional intelligence (EI) lies on the integration of emotion into cognitive processes that facilitate mental activities such as thought, memory and decision- making. Yet, prior research on EI has mainly focused on testing additive models that assume EI and cognitive abilities make independent contributions to performa...

Recent neuroscience research shows that two large-scale cortical networks are involved in organizational behavior. These two networks are naturally antagonistic - when one is active the other tends to be suppressed. The focus of the chapter is to apply the opposing-domains hypothesis to problems associated with: (1) trying to balance creative think...

The ritualistic use of statistical models regardless of the type of data actually available is a common practice across disciplines which we dare to call type zero error. Statistical models involve a series of assumptions whose existence is often neglected altogether, this is specially the case with ipsative data. This paper illustrates the consequ...

Emotional intelligence, or more accurately emotional and social intelligence (EI and SI) manifest themselves at many levels within a person. Of the various levels at which EI and SI exist within a person, the behavioral level has received the least amount of attention in academic research but holds the most promise for a concept and measurement app...

As his wife drove up to the train station, Dimitrios picked up his attaché and opened the car door. They were chatting about something seemingly unimportant as the 7:10 train arrived into the station. They kissed good bye and yet he sat there, with the car door open but not moving. The train blew its whistle and his wife said, “You's going to miss...

This paper combines the complexity notions of phase transitions and tipping points with recent advances in cognitive neuroscience to propose a general theory of human proto-organizing. It takes as a premise that a necessary prerequisite for organizing, or “proto-organizing,” occurs through emotional contagion in subpopulations of human interaction...

Personal and shared vision have a long history in management and organizational practices yet only recently have we begun to build a systematic body of empirical knowledge about the role of personal and shared vision in organizations. As the introductory paper for this special topic in Frontiers in Psychology, we present a theoretical argument as t...

The term "brain health" integrates general health and well-being with cognitive fitness, in the context of an environment that includes the spectrum of positive and negative factors affecting the individual. Brain health incorporates the effects of neurodegeneration in an ecological sense and the effects of environment and health practices on brain...

Amid the swarm of debate about emotional intelligence (EI) among academics are claims that cognitive intelligence, or general mental ability (g), is a stronger predictor of life and work outcomes as well as the counter claims that EI is their strongest predictor. Nested within the tempest in a teapot are scientific questions as to what the relation...

Amid the swarm of debate about emotional intelligence (EI) among academics are claims that cognitive intelligence, or general mental ability (g), is a stronger predictor of life and work outcomes as well as the counter claims that EI is their strongest predictor. Nested within the tempest in a teapot are scientific questions as to what the relation...

Competencies have become part of the human resoruce management systems of most organizations. A competency is composed of behvioral indicators organized around a typically unconscious intent. As different from a skill or trait, the research shows high validity agianst job and life outcome measures. Because much of the research was done by consultan...

The emerging domain of organizational neuroscience asks ‘how does the architecture of the brain explain and predict behavior in organizations?’ Such a question calls for deep expertise in multiple disciplines. Accordingly, this symposium invites an interdisciplinary panel of neuroscientists and management scholars to discuss the application of brea...

Career scholars have called for a broader definition of career success by inviting greater exploration of its antecedents. While success in various jobs has been predicted by intelligence and in other studies by competencies, especially in management, long term impact of having intelligence and using competencies has not been examined. Even in coll...

As organizational leaders worry about the appalling low percentage of people who feel engaged in their work, academics are trying to understand what causes an increase in engagement. We collected survey data from 231 team members from two organizations. We examined the impact of team members’ emotional intelligence (EI) and their perception of shar...

This symposium brings together a number of leading scholars in emotional regulation and emotional management. Our goal is to generate a comprehensive understanding of the current state of the literature on emotional regulation and management, as well as its theoretical and practical implications. We also seek to critically examine the upcoming chal...

In 1956, Akhtar Khan began a project in rural East Pakistan that inspired new approaches to community and organization development. A quarter century later, he replicated the developmental process in impoverished neighborhoods of Karachi. The techniques of shared decision making, building cooperatives, training the master trainers, and encouraging...

Since the idea of method variance was inspired by D. T. Campbell and Fiske in 1959, many papers have demonstrated an ongoing debate about both its nature and impact. Often, method variance entails an upward bias in correlations among observed variables-common method bias. This article reports a split-ballot multitrait-multimethod experimental desig...

The emergence of two distinct leadership roles, the task leader and the socio-emotional leader, has been documented in the leadership literature since the 1950s. Recent research in neuroscience suggests that the division between task-oriented and socio-emotional-oriented roles derives from a fundamental feature of our neurobiology: an antagonistic...

You've heard about the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace - that there's an incontrovertible link between executives' emotional maturity, exemplified by such capabilities as self-awareness and empathy, and their financial performance. Now, new research extends that base. Drawing on two years of research, the authors contend that...

Emotional, social and cognitive competencies shown to predict management, professional and leadership effectiveness can be developed in adults. An empirical, exploratory study was done of patterns and sustainability of competency development in a full time MBA program over 16 annual cohorts. Comparisons of MBA students at graduation with themselves...

Coaching has emerged as an increasingly popular and effective way to build leadership capability within organizations through one-on-one helping relationships. The growth of coaching practice has outpaced research, necessitating that scientists and practitioners look to complementary fields to expand their knowledge. One such field is positive psyc...

While effectiveness in various jobs has been predicted by demonstrated competencies, especially in management, long term impact of using these competencies has not been examined. Even in the area of collegiate outcome studies, none have examined the longer term impact on graduates’ careers or lives. This study was designed to assess the impact of d...

Effective coaching and mentoring is crucial to the success of individuals and organizations, yet relatively little is known about its neural underpinnings. Coaching and mentoring to the Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA) emphasizes compassion for the individual's hopes and dreams and has been shown to enhance a behavioral change. In contrast, coach...

Compassion involves noticing another’s need, empathizing, and acting to enhance their well-being. In response to another’s pain, the motivation is to increase hedonic well-being or the absence of pain. In response to another’s desire to grow, the motivation is to increase eudaimonic well-being or helping them develop. We argue that compassion inclu...

Emotional intelligence has emerged as a key factor in differentiating average from outstanding performers in managerial and leadership positions across multiple business settings, but relatively few studies have examined the role of emotional intelligence in the health care professions. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship betw...

Research collaborations in policing have been characterized as extremely challenging. The assumption has been that academicians and police hold contrasting philosophical viewpoints and perceptions of research. We tested this assumption by surveying police researchers (n = 377) and police practitioners (n = 171) concerning their philosophical orient...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the role of emotional and social intelligence in family business leaders and how it can lead to a shared vision and dramatic increase in success of a family business. Design/methodology/approach – Single organization case study interpreted through Intentional Change Theory. Findings – Using emo...

Leaders of sales organizations must recruit and inspire salespeople to grow the organization. Skepticism remains about the role of emotional and social intelligence (ESI) in effective leadership. ESI is criticized as not providing distinctive variance in leadership performance beyond general intelligence and personality. This study assessed the rol...