IAS Officers Have Average EQ, Says Study

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: gine that you are a police officer posted in a sensitive area. You get information that violent ethnic clashes have erupted between two religious communities, a large number of people have been killed from both sides and property has been damaged. What action will you take? Will you:

* Decide not to visit the spot personally as there may be a danger to your life.
* Take your time to respond—in any case this is not the first time that riots have occured
* Try and handle the situation tactically by assuaging the feelingsof both communities, and taking all desired remedial measures
* Send your subordinate inspector to study the ituation
* Arrange to hand over the dead to the respectivefamilies after getting the postmortem dead
— Emotional Intelligence At Work by Dalip Singh

Fifteen questions like these were devised by Chadha (2001) to measure different emotional responses and their blends. The test was standardised for Indian managers, businessmen and bureaucrats. It was then administered to 18 professions (artists; advertising; socialwork; teaching; legal; tourism; politics; business; police; judiciary; administration; infotech; medicine; banking; engineering; accountancy; and nursing) to test factors like emotional intelligence required, job requirements, stress experienced among those professions, etc. Out of the 395 questionnaires that were distributed, 347 provided a valid response.

Those belonging to work areas like art, insurance, advertising and social work showed an “extremely high” emotional quotient, or EQ, score. Next, those belonging to professions such as teaching, law, tourism, politics, business and police showed “high” scores. The remaining — those belonging to the judiciary, administration, information technology, medicine, banking, engineering, accountancy and nursing professions — fell in the “average” category.

Author Dalip Singh derives two findings out of Chadha’s work. First, that different professions can indeed be classified into clusters of “extremely high”, “high” and “average” on the basis of the EQ demanded from the people working in them. Two, to be successful in any of these professions, one would be better off with the corresponding amounts of EQ. The bottomline, therefore, is that if someone has high EQ and he/she gets stuck in a profession like accountancy and nursing where just average EQ is required, he/she may fail.