Empirical competence-testing: A psychometric examination of the German version of the Emotional Competence Inventory

The “Emotional Competence Inventory“ (ECI 2.0) by Goleman and
Boyatzis assesses emotional intelligence (EI) in organizational
context by means of 72 items in 4 clusters (self-awareness, self-
management, social awareness, social skills) which at large consist
of 18 competencies. Our study examines the psychometric properties
of the first German translation of this instrument in two different
surveys (N = 236). If all items are included in reliability
analysis the ECI is reliable (Cronbach’s Alpha = .90), whereas the
reliability of the four sub dimensions is much smaller (Alpha = .62
- .81). For 43 items the corrected item-total correlation with its
own scale is higher than correlations with the other three
clusters. Convergent validity was examined by using another EI
instrument (Wong & Law, 2002). We found a significant
correlation between the two instruments (r = .41). The German
version of the ECI seems to be quite useful, although the high
reliability is achieved by a large number of items. Possibilities
of improvement are discussed.