A Meta-analytic Evaluation of Time-based Antecedents of Emotional Intelligence: Age, Job Experience and Generation

Emotional intelligence (EI) exploded in popularity due to widespread claims that it is more important for success than cognitive ability. Whilst this claim is not totally accurate, subsequent research demonstrated that EI is indeed predictive of success in a variety of domains including physical health, mental health, job performance and relationship quality. However, although there is a large volume of research on outcomes of EI, relatively little is known about how EI changes with temporal-related factors. Accordingly, I used random-effects meta-analyses to determine how EI changes with age (k = 270; N = 84,101) and job experience (k = 110; N = 18,388). I used a cross-temporal meta-analysis to determine how EI changes across generations (k = 71; 17,694). For each meta-analysis, an extensive search was conducted to obtain relevant effect sizes from both published and unpublished literature. Overall, the results demonstrated that these relationships are largely dependent on how EI was conceptualised. Specifically, when EI was operationalised as a set of abilities (ability EI), there was a moderate positive relationship with age in children. In adults, ability EI was unrelated to both age and job experience. When EI was operationalised as self-perceptions of abilities (self-perceived EI), there was a small positive relationship with age, but not job experience. When EI was defined as personality (mixed model EI), there was a small positive relationship with age, and a moderate positive relationship with job experience. Occupational characteristics moderated the relationship between mixed model EI and job experience, whereby the relationship was stronger in occupations characterised by higher levels of interpersonal orientation and adjustment. Findings further demonstrated that there are generational changes in mixed model EI, as facets of mixed model EI have declined over time. In conclusion, these body of findings provide evidence that, depending on EI stream, EI ch