Podcast Review How emotions function at multiple levels with Dr. Neal Ashkanasy

Some 10 months ago I blogged about a podcast produced by the EI Consortium featuring Professor Boyatzis on Helping People Change.

The EI Consortium has started a new monthly podcast series, Working with Emotional Intelligence, where Dr. Robert Emmerling will interview members of the Emotional Intelligence Consortium to explore the relevance of emotions and emotional intelligence research to the modern workplace.

One of the firsts interviewees was with Dr. Neal Ashkanasy who discussed How emotions function at multiple levels.  Prof. Ashkanasy is the leading Australian academic on Emotional Intelligence.  He  has published over 200 journal articles and book chapters, and is author or co-author of over 300 conference papers.

In the podcast Dr. Neal Ashkanasy discusses his model of emotions that corresponds to five discrete levels of analysis and provides examples of how understanding emotions at multiple levels can be helpful in understanding and improving organizational effectiveness.

According to Ashkanasy The Five-Level Model of Emotions in the Workplace are:

Level 1: Within person

Level 2: Between-persons

Level 3: Interpersonal relationships

Level 4: Groups and teams

Level 5: The organization as a whole

As Ashkanasy points out a person goes through hundreds of varied emotions a day (Level 1) but then says at Level 2 (between 2 people) personality traits play an important role.  Level 3 relates to multiple people while Level 4 relates to teams which again can develop dominant traits.  In teams the key person is the team leader and what is important is the level of emotional intelligence of the leader which is defined by Ashkanasy as the ability to perceive, understand and manage emotions (the Salovey-Mayer model).  Finally at Level 5 we arrive at organisations and the CEO.

About two-thirds through the 43 minute podcast Ashkanasy describes how EQ training converted Australian Olympic Swimming team from losers in the 2016 Olympics to winners in 2020.  They were taught using the EQ training methods developed by David Caruso for the US Navy Seal program.  This section is really interesting.

The podcast finishes with an appeal to follow the science.  With regard to Emotional Intelligence Ashkanasy argues that the consensus is developing that the Salovey-Mayer model definition is the one to use.  Unfortunately, science is not about consensus, it is not about voting.  Again I quote from my the opening lines of my first lecture at Cambridge which was in Experimental Psychology (part of the Natural Sciences Tripos) in 1964.

“Welcome to Cambridge.  At the other place they produce Prime Ministers, here we produce Nobel Prize winners.  Cambridge is the citadel of Empiricism & Scepticism.  Here Experiment & Observation trump Innate Ideas & Traditions.  Astrology is a quack science, Freud was a quack, Jung was an even bigger one.  If you want to understand true science applied to psychology read Miller’s paper The Magical Number 7 ± 2.”

As my Blog readers will know I believe the secret to lifting your emotional intelligence is to learn a model of temperament, defined as your genetic emotional bias.  The model of temperament I use is the 7MTF.   If you want to quickly lift your EQ consider doing my practical emotional intelligence courses.  Do the basic 7MTF course for an investment of A$25 and 5 hours of your time and you will dramatically increase your EQ competency in days and your performance potential.  Besides learning the seven temperament components you will also learn the secret to EQ component recognition which is TOPDOG.  Two important clues to the dominant EQ components of a person are the organisation a person chooses for career success and the position the person holds in that organisation.

This blog was first published on LinkedIn on 17 February 2023.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/podcast-review-how-emotions-function-multiple-levels-dr-golis