ABSTRACT
As reported in Chapter 2 , we were invited to submit our Academy of Management conference paper to the Leadership Quarterly in spring of 2000. We felt happy and believed that the paper would soon be published in this mainstream management journal. However, it still took us three revisions, and we needed to add in the results of two more independent samples before the paper was accepted. As far as we know, this paper might be an important breakthrough because the emotional intelligence (EI) construct was not accepted in mainstream psychology and management literature up to the year 2002. One of the major reasons was that in 1998 a paper published in a very infl uential psychology journal severely criticized the EI construct (Davies, Stankov, & Roberts, 1998). In that paper, the authors used the EI measurement scales reported from 1990 to 1998 and the traditional Big Five personality scales to collect data from multiple samples. Using the technique of factor analysis, they found that the items of the so-called EI measurement scales could not form an independent factor. Instead, they all loaded heavily on the traditional Big Five personality factors. Thus, they concluded that EI was only an “elusive” construct and implied that scholars should stop investigating this construct and that it would not be appropriate to use the EI construct to help explain psychological phenomena.
