Social Context and the Psychology of Emotional Intelligence: A Key to Creating Positive Organizations

In this chapter, we bridge work on positive organizational scholarship (POS) and emotional intelligence by focusing on their common element-an emphasis on how people navigate social interactions and relationships. We put forth a synthesis-social-emotional intelligence-based on two assumptions: (a) a useful integration of POS and emotional intelligence needs to describe the social context in order to understand when and why people apply their emotional intelligence skills; and (b) a useful model of emotional intelligence needs to be based on agreed upon conceptions of how the mind works-namely, by defining the interaction between intuitive (automatic) and deliberative (controlled) processes that underlie emotional intelligence abilities (e.g., emotional recognition and control). Our synthesis adds flexibility and adaptability to the emotional intelligence process and takes into account how it interacts with the presence or absence of positive organizational environments.