The Effect of Age and Work Experience on Emotional Intelligence: A Meta-Analytic Review

Emotional intelligence is likely to change across the lifespan due to variations in intelligence, physiology, motivation and the accumulation of experiences. As such, we hypothesized that there would be relationships between emotional intelligence with age and work experience. We used meta-analyses to test these hypotheses, which revealed that there were significantly positive relationships between emotional intelligence and both age and work experience. In addition, there was a significantly negative relationship between the facet “perceiving emotions” and age, whilst there was a significantly positive relationship between “understanding emotions” and work experience. The findings are discussed in relation to how this study contributes to the literature on the nature of emotional intelligence. Practical implications are also discussed broadly for individuals in organizations.