Abstract
Managers’interest in the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has grown steadily due to an accumulation of published articlesand books touting EI’s benefits. For over thirty years, many researchers have used or designed tools for measuring EI, most ofwhich raise important psychometric, cultural and contextual issues. The aim of this article is to address some of the mainlimitations observed in previous studies of EI. By developing and validating QEPro we propose a new performance-basedmeasure of EI based on a modified version of Mayer and Salovey’s(1997) four-branch model. QEPro is an ability EI measurespecifically dedicated to managers and business executives in a French cultural environment (N= 1035 managers and execu-tives). In order to increase both the ecological and the face validity of the test for the target population we used the SituationalJudgment Tests framework and a theory-based item development and scoring approach. For all items, correct and incorrectresponse options were developed using established theories from the emotion and management fields. Our study showed thatQEPro has good psychometric qualities such as high measurement precision and internal consistency, an appropriate level ofdifficulty and a clear factorial structure. The tool also correlates in meaningful and theoretically congruent ways with generalintelligence, Trait EI measures, the Big Five factors of personality, and the Affect measures used in this study. For all thesereasons, QEPro is a promising tool for studying the role of EI competencies in managerial outcomes.