Why Every Employee Deserves Emotional Intelligence Training

Ask most people which employees get sent on emotional intelligence training and the answer is usually senior leaders, high-potential managers, and aspiring leaders. In other words, the people whose jobs are obviously about relationships.

It's an assumption so embedded in how organisations approach learning and development that it doesn’t often get questioned, but a growing body of research - including a significant new meta-analysis published in BMC Psychology this year - suggests it's time we did.

The Leadership Myth

The association between EI and leadership has strong empirical foundations. Normative data from the EQ-i 2.0, drawn from over 4,000 respondents, shows that corporate leaders score significantly higher on every composite and subscale of the EQ-i 2.0 than the general population, with a large overall effect size (d = 0.82). So, it is understandable that investment in EI development has concentrated at the leadership tier, where the returns seemed most obvious.

But somewhere along the way, a reasonable insight — that leaders especially need emotional competence — has calcified into something more limiting: the idea that emotional intelligence training is primarily for leaders. The result is that many organisations channel this kind of development upward, reserving it for those already in, or on a path to, management.

However, the research tells a different story.

Every Job Is an Emotional Job

Think about the last time you had a difficult day at work. The chances are it involved navigating a tense conversation with a colleague, managing your frustration about a setback you faced, or finding a way to stay composed when a client or customer was being unreasonable. These are not leadership challenges; they're just the ordinary emotional texture of working life.

Research by Levitats, Ivcevic and Brackett (2025) at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, reviewing three decades of evidence, found that EI ability consistently predicts greater job satisfaction and lower burnout. They also found that emotionally intelligent employees are seen by both peers and supervisors as contributing more positively to the people around them, even after accounting for personality and verbal ability.

If EI ability matters to outcomes across all roles, the implications for training are equally clear. A meta-analysis by Mehler and colleagues, published in BMC Psychology in 2024, analysed 50 workplace studies involving over 3,200 participants and found that improvements from emotional competency training were statistically equivalent across all professional groups — teachers, healthcare workers, managers, and others showed the same level of benefit. As the researchers put it, that consistency reflects the fact that, regardless of job title, everyone has to manage their own emotions, interact with others, and navigate interpersonal demands every day.

Perhaps more importantly, the effects weren't fleeting. Training benefits persisted more than three months after the programme ended, suggesting real and lasting behavioural change, not just short-lived awareness.

In short, virtually every role involves managing emotions, navigating relationships, and handling pressure. The job title doesn't change that.

Access to EI Training is Uneven

Despite the evidence, access to emotional intelligence training remains unevenly distributed. A 2019 report by the Capgemini Research Institute, surveying 750 executives and 1,500 employees across multiple sectors, found that while demand for EI skills is set to increase sixfold in the coming years, "recruitment and training in this area has mostly failed to adapt." Most investment continues to flow toward senior levels, leaving large portions of the workforce without access to development that research shows would genuinely benefit them.

This isn't just an equity issue, though it is that too, it's a strategic one. When only a fraction of your workforce develops stronger emotional skills, the benefits are limited. Culture is shaped by everyone, not just those at the top. Team dynamics depend on the emotional competence of all team members, not just the manager. Customer experiences are created by frontline employees, not senior executives.

The O.C. Tanner Institute's research makes the stakes concrete. Their 2025 Global Culture Report found that organisations where EI is practised at all levels (by individuals, leaders, and the organisation collectively) are 107 times more likely to be considered thriving. Their 2026 report adds a team-level dimension: emotional intelligence is one of five core behaviours that define inclusive teams, and employees who work in genuinely inclusive teams are ten times more likely to be thriving — yet only 32% of employees say they have one.

So, what’s holding organisations back?

Partly it's cost and logistics, since rolling out development programmes at scale is harder than sending a cohort of leaders on a course. Partly it's the lingering assumption that emotional skills are somehow innate: either you have them or you don't. And partly it's simply habit; organisations tend to invest in what they've always invested in.

But the "you can't teach empathy" argument doesn't hold up. The research is clear that emotional competencies are trainable. The question is not whether to invest, but in whom.

What Organisation-Wide Looks Like in Practice

Expanding EI training doesn't have to mean rolling out identical programmes to everyone. In fact, the Mehler et al. research suggests that while the outcomes are consistent across professions, tailoring content to reflect the specific emotional demands of different roles could improve both relevance and participant engagement.

For a healthcare team, that might mean focusing on managing compassion fatigue and difficult patient interactions. For a customer service function, it could centre on staying regulated under pressure. For a warehouse or production team, it might look like conflict resolution and communication skills. The underlying emotional competencies being trained are similar, but the context brings them to life.

The research suggests that what matters most is that training isn't treated as a one-off event. Effects persist, but they don't keep growing without reinforcement, so embedding regular reflective practice, peer support structures, or brief refresher sessions makes the difference between a workshop people attend and skills people actually use.

There is a deeper dimension to organisation-wide EI development that goes beyond programme design. Research by Levitats, Ivcevic and Brackett (2025) proposes that emotionally intelligent behaviour at work depends not only on individual ability - the skills someone develops through training - but also on the motivation to use those skills, and the organisational opportunity to do so.

Motivation, they argue, is shaped by whether employees believe that emotionally intelligent behaviour will be recognised and rewarded. Opportunity depends on whether team climate, leadership behaviour, and organisational culture actively support the expression of emotional skills in everyday working life. Training can build capability, but if the surrounding environment signals that emotions are best left at the door, capability and behaviour can diverge.

For organisations serious about developing EI at every level, this makes training a starting point rather than an endpoint. What leaders model, what norms exist around emotion within teams, and whether HR practices reinforce what training develops are what determine whether newly built skills show up in how people work.

A Different Way of Thinking About Development

There's a broader mindset shift here. For a long time, emotional intelligence has been positioned as a premium development offering and therefore something reserved for those deemed high-potential or high-profile. But the evidence suggests it's closer to a universal human workplace skill, and one that benefits individuals regardless of their role, seniority, or sector.

As the researchers behind the meta-analysis put it, the data argues for organisations to consider "incorporating emotional competence training into their employee and leadership development programs routinely."

That's a meaningful shift in ambition and given what the research shows about returns such as improved wellbeing, better relationships, reduced stress, stronger team dynamics, it's one that's hard to argue against.

The question isn't whether your frontline staff, your administrative team, or your middle managers would benefit from developing their emotional competence. The evidence says they would. The question is whether your organisation is willing to extend the opportunity to them.

Sources

MHS. (2011). EQ-i 2.0 Technical Manual. Multi-Health Systems. [Table A.28]

Mehler, M., Balint, E., Gralla, M., Pößnecker, T., Gast, M., Hölzer, M., Kösters, M., & Gündel, H. (2024). Training emotional competencies at the workplace: A systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Psychology, 12, 718. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-02198-3

Levitats, Z., Ivcevic, Z., & Brackett, M. (2025). Emotionally intelligent behavior in organizations: When ability, motivation, and opportunity meet. Emotion Review, 17(3), 168–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/17540739251333990

Capgemini Research Institute. (2019). Emotional intelligence: The essential skillset for the age of AI. Capgemini.

O.C. Tanner Institute. (2025). Applied emotional intelligence. In 2025 Global Culture Report. https://www.octanner.com/global-culture-report/2025-applied-emotional-intelligence