The role of interpersonal sensitivity in workplace performance

The association between emotion recognition ability, or interpersonal sensitivity more generally, and job performance has been studied extensively and in a variety of professions.

Generally, a positive relationship was found (Elfenbein, Foo, White, Tan, & Aik, 2007). For example, Costanzo and Philpott (1986) reported that clinical psychology students’ accuracy in emotion recognition was more predictive of therapeutic talent than was their academic achievement or previous counseling experience. Rosenthal et al. (1979) demonstrated a positive relationship between supervisory status or job effectiveness and emotion recognition in several samples of business executives, foreign service officers, and human service workers. Furthermore, they found positive correlations between emotion recognition ability and school principals’ leadership skills and teachers’ job ratings.

More recently, Rubin, Munz, and Bommer (2005) reported that emotion recognition ability predicted transformational leadership behavior and constructive reward behavior in managers.

Transformational leadership behavior represents the most active and effective form of leadership in which leaders are closely engaged with followers, motivating them to perform beyond their formal agreements by attending to employees’ individual needs, providing a vision for the future, and

acting as a role model. Similarly, in a laboratory study in which students were randomly assigned to the subordinate or the leader role in a dyadic interaction, Schmid Mast et al. (2012) found that leaders scoring high on empathic accuracy (the ability to infer another person’s thoughts and emotions) had more satisfied subordinates. Finally, Byron, Terranova, and Nowicki (2007) showed that salespeople for building supply and automobiles had higher annual salaries the better they performed in a test of emotion recognition ability. However, these particularly sensitive

salespersons did not rate themselves as more successful than their colleagues. From their studies, Rosenthal et al. (1979) concluded that people whose professions require effective interpersonal interactions are more accurate in recognizing emotions than those whose professions are less social.

Recent support for this finding was provided in a study of over 3500 employees by Scherer and Scherer (2011). They found that employees working in sales, administrative, and human resources positions on average had higher scores on a standardized test of emotion recognition ability.

In their meta-analysis, Elfenbein et al. (2007) found an average effect size of .20 (p<.01) for the relationship between emotion recognition ability and job performance. However, recent

research suggests that emotion recognition ability does not benefit all individuals in the same way:

Bommer, Pesta, and Storrud-Barnes (2011) found that emotion recognition predicted assessment center performance of business students over general mental ability, but only for non-Caucasian participants. This relationship was explained with the “subordination hypothesis”, according to which people lower in status or power should be motivated to recognize better the emotional displays of those with higher status or power (Snodgrass, 1992). The relationship between emotion recognition and job performance also seems to vary by occupational type and employee gender. For example, Byron (2008) reported that female but not male managers who were better at nonverbal emotion recognition received higher ratings from their subordinates, which they interpreted in terms of gender stereotypes. Nevertheless, both male and female salespeople benefited from better nonverbal emotion recognition skills in that they received higher annual salary increases.

Elfenbein, Polzer, and Ambady (2007) proposed that measuring individual employees’ skill in recognizing emotions might not be sufficient to explain effective social interaction. They

introduced the new construct of team emotion recognition accuracy, proposing that a team’s emotional skills can be more than the sum of their individual abilities because benefits of emotions in the workplace largely arise due to coordinating interactions. In a study of public service interns, they found that team emotion recognition accuracy, measured at the time of team formation, accounted for 28% of the variance in performance one year later. However, this team characteristic cannot be obtained using a standard measure, but is based on the creation of emotional video stimuli from all team members which are then judged by all other team members.

While most research to date has presented emotion recognition ability as a beneficial skill, some scholars also suggested that being able to read others’ nonverbal expressions might have a negative impact on job performance. For example, Bechtoldt, Beersma, Rohrmann, and Sanchez-Burks (2013) proposed that high emotion recognition ability might increase the risk of conflict-escalating behavior. They showed that over a period of 2.5 months team members who were better at recognizing emotions made more relationship-oriented and less task-oriented conflict

attributions. Furthermore, Elfenbein and Ambady (2002b) proposed that some individuals might read more from others’ nonverbal cues than is actually good to maintain a smooth social

interaction. More specifically, recognizing emotions better from less controllable channels such as the voice or body than from the more controllable face (“eavesdropping”) can reveal emotions which a person tried to conceal, for example to comply with social norms. Discovering such

“leakage” can impair rapport in an interaction, when it is actually more polite to ignore potential negative emotions (Puccinelli & Tickle-Degnen, 2004).

In the workplace, the ability to eavesdrop on less controllable channels might be beneficial or detrimental depending on the demands that a profession places on employees. For example, performance of interns in a pediatric ward was rated as more positive by supervisors when they

were better at recognizing emotions from uncontrollable than controllable channels, because children are less able to express emotions verbally (Tickle-Degnen, 1998). A similar result was reported by DiMatteo, Friedman, and Taranta (1979) regarding patient ratings for medical doctors, suggesting that patients seem to value when doctors are able to read emotions that they are hesitant to express directly. By contrast, in the study by Tickle-Degnen (1998), for psychosocial

fieldworkers the opposite was found: They received higher supervisor ratings when they recognized emotions from controllable channels better than from uncontrollable channels, suggesting that reading unintended nonverbal signals from their patients might impair the patient-fieldworker relationship. Similarly, customer service employees were judged as better service providers by customers when they were better at recognizing emotions in the face than in the body (see Puccinelli & Tickle-Degnen, 2004). In their study on public service employees, Elfenbein and Ambady (2002b) additionally distinguished between the ability to eavesdrop on positive versus negative emotions. They found that the ability to eavesdrop on positive emotions from vocal stimuli was predictive of better performance ratings from colleagues and supervisors, whereas

eavesdropping on negative emotions was negatively related to performance. The ability to recognize negative emotions that “leaked” through the voice made these employees less pleasant people to work with, whereas better recognition of sincere positive messages constituted an advantage in the workplace.

To summarize, the majority of the studies investigating emotion recognition ability and job performance found a positive relationship. In addition, some studies showed that the association between the two variables is more complex and depends on the nonverbal channels, the professions, or the groups of individuals that are considered. However, previous studies also have certain

limitations. First, they have rarely controlled for other emotional and cognitive abilities or

personality (for an exception, see Bommer et al., 2011). In order to interpret the effects of emotion recognition ability more thoroughly, it should be assessed whether this ability predicts performance

uniquely or whether it can be explained by, e.g., the association of intelligence with job performance. Second, previous studies have mostly looked at subjective measures of job

performance such as supervisor ratings. It therefore remains unclear whether the positive effect of emotion recognition is due to better actual job performance or due to a halo effect and more liking on the part of the raters for individuals scoring high on this ability. Third, almost no study has investigated the mechanisms underlying these effects, such as whether individuals with high emotion recognition ability show nonverbal behavior that is different from individuals with lower ability, or whether these individuals react differently to other people’s behavior. The link between emotion recognition and job performance therefore largely remains an unopened “black box“

(Elfenbein et al., 2007). Relatedly, as most studies are based on cross-sectional correlations, it is difficult to evaluate the causal paths of emotion recognition ability – performance relationships. On the one hand, emotion recognition ability can be a cause of better workplace outcomes as is

assumed in the majority of the related studies. On the other hand, indicators of professional success, such as being in a managing position, might provide individuals with a surrounding suitable to improve their nonverbal decoding skills. Being in a leadership position at the workplace over a longer period might thus stably increase interpersonal sensitivity. Alternatively, the positive

relationship between emotion recognition ability and workplace success, or successful psychosocial functioning more generally, might also be a result of the combination of both paths or a result of third variables, such as cognitive intelligence (Hall et al., 2009).