A motivational model of emotional intelligence competency display

This paper proposes a motivational view over the display of different emotional intelligence competencies. The efficacy of organizations is rooted on the emotional intelligence competencies of workers. As this idea becomes widely accepted organizations have invested on the development of individual competencies best suited for their businesses. However, in general people present different levels of facility on developing competencies. A possible explanation for these differences lays on the fact that people have different implicit motivations. Such motivations, main drivers of the behaviours, are more stable and can facilitate the development of particular competencies. For this reason, the identification of the implicit motivations that underlie the different emotional intelligence competencies is important. It can help to explain why people present different competencies and better direct the investments to its development. The paper here proposed bases itself on this premise to suggest a model of emotional intelligence competencies display based on the three social motives (affiliation, power and achievement). The first section of the paper will explore the competency movement. This construct, despite its controversial status among academics, have definitely entered the practitioner world and impacted the way organizations are managed. The discussion around the competency movement will settle the terrain for the central subject of the paper that is the correlation between emotional intelligence competencies and implicit motivations. In a sub-section, it will be discussed the emotional intelligence competency approach to competencies. The recognition that skills other than the technical ones are fundamental for the personal and organizational effectiveness widened the research agenda towards emotional and social competencies. Since emotional intelligence competency, at this paper, will be treated as consistent emotional and social behaviour that contributes to effective performance, the second section of this paper will concentrate on the role of motivations on driving people¿s behaviour. On the following sub-section, the discussion will be centered on the implicit motivations that drive behaviours, specifically the 3 social motives theory. Finally, theory linking the three social motives to the display of effective professional profiles will be used to derive a model of emotional intelligence competency display based on the three social motives. An agenda for future research and a final section of conclusion will end the paper.