Emotional and social intelligence competencies as predictors of managers’ career success, career and life satisfaction

Human capital factors such as dispositional traits, motivation and education have been demonstrated to explain why individuals are more successful in their careers than others and why they are more satisfied with their life and career. Recently, scholars have suggested that another important predictor of career success and employees’ satisfaction is emotional intelligence. However, few attempts have been made to provide an empirical support on how emotional and social intelligence competencies predict managers’ career success as well as their perceived career and life satisfaction later on in their work lives. This paper addresses this issue contributing to the growing body of literature that aims to understand the role of emotional intelligence in the workplace. The research design adopts a longitudinal study on a sample of Italian managers who participated in the last nine editions of a part time MBA. Within the MBA a process of assessment of the emotional and social competencies was carried out adopting the critical incident interview technique. Data on the three dependent variables (career success, life and career satisfaction) has been collected through an on line survey. We asked the managers to rate their life and career satisfaction on item scales validated by prior research, whereas we measured career success adopting objective measures such as hierarchical position and promotions. Against the cross-sectional nature of prior studies, this paper provides a preliminary empirical evidence on the long term impact of behavioral competencies on both managers’ career success as well as life and career satisfaction. In addition, it offers insights on the specific emotional and social intelligence competencies that predict managers’ success and satisfaction drawing implications in terms of competency-based human resource management practices.