PSY 301 Week 1 Emotional Intelligence Models and Self-Assessment Example

Reading the Room and Reading Myself: Emotional Intelligence Models and a Charge Nurse's Self-Assessment

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSY/301: Emotional Intelligence

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The charge nurse and the situations described are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Emotional intelligence refers to the capacity to notice what you and the people around you feel, make sense of those feelings and steer them well. The idea became popular in the 1990s, and it is now used widely in hiring, leadership training and education. This paper explains the major models, reviews what research says about them and applies them to a composite charge nurse's honest self-assessment at work.

The Person

Keisha is thirty-eight and works as the charge nurse for a medical-surgical floor at a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. Patients and families regularly praise her calm, warm manner. On short-staffed shifts, though, she gives terse, one-word instructions, sighs audibly when nurses ask questions and once snapped at a new graduate in front of a patient. Afterward she feels guilty but believes stress is simply part of the job and that good nurses toughen up. Her manager suggested she take this course after a staff survey rated the unit's teamwork poorly.

Two Families of Models

Mayer et al. (2008) described emotional intelligence as an ability made up of four branches: perceiving emotions accurately, using emotions to facilitate thinking, understanding emotions and how they change and managing emotions in oneself and others. They argued that it should be measured with performance tests that have better and worse answers, like other forms of intelligence, and they distinguished this ability approach from broader mixed models that combine emotional skills with traits such as optimism and motivation.

Mixed models, popular in business and health care settings, group competencies into four areas, awareness and control of one's own feelings and awareness and handling of other people's, usually measured with self-report or ratings by others. These models capture useful workplace behaviors but overlap heavily with personality traits such as extraversion and emotional stability.

What Research Says It Predicts

Joseph and Newman (2010) combined studies in an integrative meta-analysis and found that emotional intelligence was related to job performance, but the relationship depended on the type of measure and the type of job. Ability measures showed modest relationships, and emotional intelligence mattered more in jobs with high emotional labor, where workers must manage their own and others' emotions as part of the work, such as nursing and customer service. Mixed measures predicted performance partly because they overlap with personality and other abilities.

For Keisha, this research suggests that emotional skills are especially relevant: nursing is a high emotional labor job, and her role as charge nurse adds the task of managing a team's emotions.

Why It Matters Beyond Work

Emotional skills may also affect well-being. Schutte et al. (2007) pooled results from many samples and reported that higher emotional intelligence was associated with better mental health and, to a smaller degree, better physical and psychosomatic health. For Keisha, managing stress more effectively may protect her own health as well as her team's climate. Nurses who carry unmanaged frustration home report more exhaustion, and burnout is a known risk on understaffed units.

How the Assessment Was Done

Keisha took the questionnaire twice, once after a calm shift and once after a chaotic one, to see whether her ratings changed with mood. They did slightly: after the hard shift she rated her self-management lower. She also kept a short log for two weeks, noting moments when she felt frustrated, what triggered it and how she responded. The log gave her concrete examples to compare with the questionnaire.

Keisha's Self-Assessment

Keisha completed a self-report questionnaire based on a mixed model and rated herself on each area.

Self-awareness: high. She says she knows when she is stressed. She can name her feelings during a hard shift, but she often notices them only after a conflict.

Self-management: moderate. She stays calm with patients but not with staff when overloaded.

Social awareness: high with patients, whose distress she reads quickly; lower with staff, whose confusion she reads as incompetence.

Relationship management: moderate. Nurses respect her skill but avoid asking her questions on busy shifts.

Comparing Self-View With Others' Views

Self-reports have limits; people may not see how they come across. Keisha asked two nurses she trusts to rate her on the same areas. Both rated her high in empathy toward patients and lower in self-management than she did, noting that her stress shows in her tone and body language even when she believes she is hiding it. This gap is common, especially for people who feel calm inside while their faces and voices show strain, and it is one reason ability tests and ratings by others are useful alongside self-reports.

Keisha thought she kept her stress to herself; her coworkers could hear it in every clipped instruction.

Ability Perspective on the Same Behavior

Viewed through the four-branch model, Keisha perceives emotions well, especially in patients and their families. Her main difficulty is in managing emotions, both her own under pressure and her team's. Understanding emotions may also be involved: she interprets a nurse's repeated questions as carelessness rather than anxiety, a misreading that fuels her irritation.

Strengths and Growth Area

Keisha's strengths are perceiving and responding to patients' emotions and a genuine desire to improve. Her key growth area, agreed on by her own log and her coworkers' ratings, is managing emotions under stress, especially recognizing her own rising frustration before it shows and responding to staff anxiety with support rather than impatience. Week 2 will build a concrete plan for that skill.

Limits of This Assessment

Self-report questionnaires measure how people see themselves, which may not match actual ability. Feedback from two coworkers adds perspective but is a small sample. A performance-based ability test or broader feedback from her whole team, gathered anonymously, would give a fuller picture.

Conclusion

Emotional intelligence can be understood as a set of abilities or as a broader mix of skills and traits, and research suggests it matters most in emotionally demanding jobs like Keisha's. Her self-assessment, checked against coworkers' views, shows strong emotional perception with patients and a clear growth area in managing emotions under stress, especially with her team.

References

Joseph, D. L., & Newman, D. A. (2010). Emotional intelligence: An integrative meta-analysis and cascading model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 54-78. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017286

Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2008). Emotional intelligence: New ability or eclectic traits? American Psychologist, 63(6), 503-517. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.63.6.503

Schutte, N. S., Malouff, J. M., Thorsteinsson, E. B., Bhullar, N., & Rooke, S. E. (2007). A meta-analytic investigation of the relationship between emotional intelligence and health. Personality and Individual Differences, 42(6), 921-933. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2006.09.003