Cognitive Design

Emotional intelligence is our ability to spot, understand and manage emotional states in ourselves and others.  It has been a topic of increasing importance to leaders but has yet to have a game-changing impact on workforce management.

Our level of emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient (EQ), can be measured and has been found to correlate strongly to high performance in some domains.  An interesting recent study by the University of Haifa looked at 809 employees in four companies and found:

“Meisler says the study indicates employees with a high level of emotional intelligence were more satisfied with their jobs and were more committed to their organizations. They also had fewer undesirable work attitudes — such as burnout, intention to leave and negligent behavior.”

This suggests that measuring EQ may be a useful tool for general workforce management. For the cognitive designer it implies that EQ measurements may provide insight into the unique cognitive needs and characteristics of employees.

Very interested to hear from designers that use EQ measurements as way to uncover cognitive needs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 at 11:45 am and is filed under Psychographics, Related Fields. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.