ISSUES IN ACCOUNTING EDUCATION American Accounting Association

Vol. 26, No. 2 DOI: 10.2308/iace-10001

2011
pp. 267–286

Emotional Intelligence: The Role of

Accounting Education and Work Experience
Gail Lynn Cook, Darlene Bay, Beth Visser,
Jean E. Myburgh, and Joyce Njoroge
ABSTRACT: Emotional intelligence may allow accountants to perform better in
leadership, team building, client relations, and decision-making. Unfortunately, very
little is known about the antecedents to emotional intelligence; however, there have been
attempts to improve the emotional intelligence of university students through classroom
exercises. It has also been suggested that work experience is instrumental in improving
emotional intelligence. In this study, we examined the emotional intelligence of a total of
430 first- and fourth-year accounting and liberal arts students at three universities with
accounting programs that include different liberal arts requirements. We also analyzed
the relationship between four components of work experience and emotional
intelligence. Our findings raise concerns for accounting program development and
provide guidance for those seeking to facilitate relevant work experiences for students.
Keywords: emotional intelligence; accounting education; work experience.

INTRODUCTION

E
motions play a large role in organizational life, and emotional intelligence (the ability to
recognize, use, and manage emotions [Mayer et al. 2001]) is a skill that may allow
accountants to perform better in a variety of areas such as leadership, team building, client
relations, and, perhaps, decision-making. Akers and Porter (2003, 65) go so far as to state that
‘‘emotional intelligence skills are critical for the success of the accounting profession.’’ Personal
competencies that relate to emotional intelligence, including leadership, team building, and
interpersonal relations, are recognized as important in the Core Competency Framework of the
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA 2010), the Core Competency Map of
the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA 2010), the Learning Outcome Statements
and Professional Development Programs of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA 2008),
and the Competency Map of the Certified Management Accountants of Canada (CMA 2010).
To date, research has lagged behind practice with respect to emotional intelligence (EI).
Although few studies have addressed the EI of accountants, the big accounting firms clearly believe

Gail Lynn Cook and Darlene Bay are Associate Professors at Brock University; Beth Visser is an Assistant
Professor at Trent University; Jean E. Myburgh is an Associate Professor at the University of Pretoria; and
Joyce Njoroge is an Associate Professor at Drake University.

This paper has benefitted from the helpful comments of the editor, the associate editor, and two anonymous reviewers.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the CA/Brock Institute of International Issues in Accounting.
Published Online: May 2011

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268 Cook, Bay, Visser, Myburgh, and Njoroge

it to be important. Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) both offer training in emotional

intelligence (Deloitte 2010; PwC 2010). In addition, KPMG recently included EI as one of the
required characteristics in an announcement of a position opening (KPMG 2010). In addition to this
evidence that accounting firms regard EI as an important skill, there is evidence that other
employers are also interested in new hires with greater EI skills and are beginning to implement
tests of EI into their hiring processes (Noonan 2006).
In spite of this clear evidence from practice, the response of accounting educators has been slow.
Some prior research has focused on interventions to directly improve specific EI-related
competencies that were identified as necessary for success in accounting. For example, Miller and
Stone (2009) researched the ability of educational interventions to increase public-speaking
motivation and decrease public-speaking apprehension. Bryant and Albring (2006) offered
guidelines for effective use of teams in accounting classes. Other studies have investigated the
relationships between personality characteristics and development of specific competencies (e.g.,
Schleifer and Dull 2009; Elias 1999). In this study, we investigated potential antecedents of EI, a
personal competency that can be expected to impact performance in the classroom and in practice.
In this study, we propose that both a liberal-based education and work experience may provide
the means for developing students’ EI. Further, both can be included as part of a curriculum
designed to improve the EI of the graduate. To provide evidence on the role of each of these two
antecedents, first- and fourth-year accounting and liberal arts students with varying degrees of work
experience at three universities with varying degrees of technical versus liberal arts components in
their accounting programs were surveyed. We administered an established measure of EI as well as
an established measure of psychopathy, a characteristic that might limit development of EI. In
addition, we gathered demographic information and information about the students’ work
experience. Work experience was rated based on four criteria to better understand the role of
specific components of work experience in the development of EI.
Our results indicate that higher education, by itself, does not increase the EI of students.
Further, there is no difference in the effect of accounting education compared to a liberal
education—neither was related to higher EI scores in fourth-year students compared to first-year
students. In only one of the three schools in the study was the EI of the accounting students higher in
the fourth year than in the first year, perhaps as a result of a program intended to increase retention.
Thus, students may not be graduating from accounting programs with a level of EI adequate to meet
the needs expressed by the professional organizations. Finally, accounting educators should note
that increasing EI of the students may require specifically targeted interventions.
The remainder of the paper progresses as follows. In the next section, we discuss EI and its
antecedents. Then, we develop the hypotheses and describe the methods used in the study.
Following the methods, we present the results and conclude with a discussion of our findings and
implications for accounting educators.

DEFINITION OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

The concept of EI has developed as one of the responses to a growing realization that the
workplace is not a purely rational environment and should not be approached as such (Zeidner et al.
2009). Emotions, far from being irrelevant, impact performance and outcomes. There are even
employees whose primary job is to respond to and change the emotions of others (see Hochschild
[1983] for the seminal work about emotion workers). Initially, EI was very broadly conceptualized as
encompassing all skills not directly related to general cognitive ability, but that contribute to
management success (Goleman 1995). The array of abilities that have been classed under the heading
of EI can also be termed people skills, soft skills, or social skills. In response to calls to clarify the
construct and provide more precise, focused definitions, two different constructs—each of which

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relates to a distinct conceptualization of what EI is, how it can be recognized, and what effects it can
be expected to have—have been identified: Trait EI and Ability EI (Petrides and Furnham 2003).
Trait EI consists of a list of skills, abilities, personality traits, and characteristics that are
important in achieving success in the workplace and in life. The list includes optimism, problem
solving, empathy, stress tolerance, and self-actualization. Many of the items classified as elements
of Trait EI have intuitive appeal. For example, it is difficult to argue that the ability to effectively
achieve and maintain good interpersonal relationships would not be important to performance in
most jobs as well as to one’s overall happiness. As intuitive as the concept may seem, some
problems remain with respect to this definition of EI. First, no consensus has emerged as to how
many, or which, traits should be included. The various instruments intended to measure Trait EI do
not all contain the same subscales or the same lower-level constructs (Zeidner et al. 2009). Perhaps
most importantly, there is continued concern that Trait EI overlaps too much with personality
measures that are already well established and well researched (Zeidner et al. 2009) and thus adds
little to our understanding or ability to predict behavior.
The definition of Ability EI is closer than is Trait EI to what one would typically consider an
intelligence (Mayer et al. 2001). It is defined as the ability to recognize emotions in oneself and
others and respond appropriately. Ability EI includes the ability to use the information that
emotions convey for problem solving and decision making. There has been some concern that
Ability EI is not sufficiently distinguishable from general cognitive ability (Matthews et al. 2002).
While research does show significant correlations between general cognitive ability and Ability EI,
a meta-analysis has shown that, in some cases, Ability EI does have predictive value after
controlling for IQ (Van Rooy and Viswesvaran 2004).
EI research is still relatively new. For that reason, not all studies have mindfully chosen the EI
construct that most clearly relates to the research question. This study employs the ability definition
of EI. The current study is intended to investigate two potential predictors of EI: a university
education and job experience. Given the interest in higher education, the more cognitive of the two
conceptualizations would seem to be consistent with the mission of fostering the intellectual and
emotional growth of students (Lindebaum 2009). Scores on measures of Ability EI have been
shown to increase with age during the childhood years (Mayer et al. 1999; Palmer et al. 2005),
whereas no such evidence exists for similar developmental changes in Trait EI (Lindebaum 2009).
This discrepancy suggests that educational interventions might be more appropriately evaluated
with the former rather than the latter. However, it should be noted that no solid evidence exists to
show that Ability EI continues to increase in the adult years (Zeidner et al. 2009), and the processes
that cause the increases in the childhood years are not well understood (Lindebaum 2009).
On a practical level, attempts to evaluate educational outcomes using Trait EI would require
identification of which specific traits should be valued. There is substantial evidence that not all traits
are important in all professions (Stein and Book 2006). Lindebaum (2009) has even suggested that
high levels of EI might be counterproductive in some professions. He provides the example of the
construction industry, where many of the ‘‘softer’’ human resource management initiatives have not
been effective. He suggests that Trait EI in this environment would not lead to improved performance.
We suggest that Ability EI would enable the decision maker to perceive the prevailing attitudes and
expectations of transaction partners even in this industry, allowing her to respond appropriately rather
than continuing to behave in a situationally ineffective manner. Thus, Ability EI would seem to be
more advantageous than Trait EI to students in diverse programs with dissimilar career objectives.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE—THE STATE OF THE ART

As with any emerging concept, EI has not yet been universally accepted as a construct. Popular
science books and articles have proliferated as have consultants who earn substantial fees providing
EI workshops (Cherniss 2000). However, academics have been much slower to respond to calls to

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increase our understanding of EI. Continuing concern has been expressed about its predictive ability
and about the construct validity of the instruments that have been developed to measure both types
of EI. The most thorough critique of EI was conducted by a group of researchers who published two
reviews: one in 2002 and the other in 2009. In the first (Matthews et al. 2002), the researchers
concluded their report with strong concerns about whether EI would develop into a useful and
reasonable field of inquiry. In the second (Zeidner et al. 2009), while the researchers still expressed
reservations, they clearly believed that much advancement in EI research had been made in the past
seven years. The authors conclude their 2009 book with suggestions for ways to advance the study
of EI, especially in terms of measurement instruments, but they express substantially less doubt
about the viability of the construct: ‘‘[T]here is an emerging consensus among experts that, if
properly defined, the ability-based concept of EI is scientifically plausible and practically
meaningful’’ (Zeidner et al. 2009, 99).
Research regarding EI has produced mixed results. The initial claims that EI is more predictive
of performance in the workplace than IQ (i.e., Goleman 1995) have not been empirically supported.
A meta-analysis completed in 2004 concluded that EI is a valuable predictor of performance, but
that the effect size is often small and does not exceed the effect of general cognitive ability (Van
Rooy and Viswesvaran 2004). However, some empirical studies continue to provide evidence of a
link between EI and performance. For example, partners at a large public accounting firm with
strong self-management and social skills contributed significantly greater incremental profits than
those partners with strong analytical reasoning skills (from Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power
of Emotional Intelligence by Goleman et al. [2002], cited in Akers and Porter [2003]). Job
applicants with higher EI are more likely to be successful during the hiring process (Maynard 2003;
Fox and Spector 2000). EI has also been found to be important to effective teamwork (Jordan et al.
2002), effective leadership (Rosete and Ciarrochi 2005), and the potential to be a high performer
(Dries and Pepermans 2007). In addition, EI is related to other work outcomes such as contribution
to a positive work environment (Lopes et al. 2006), job satisfaction (Sy et al. 2006), conflict
resolution styles (Jordan and Troth 2002), and organizational commitment (Carmeli 2003).
One of the reasons for inconclusive results may reside in significant differences in findings
depending on the instrument used. Perhaps more importantly, it seems likely that searching for a
main effect of EI across all types of work activities will be less fruitful than investigating interactions
of EI with other variables or a moderating effect of EI in established relationships (Abraham 2005;
Zeidner et al. 2009). For example, there is some evidence that the type of job may moderate the
impact of EI on performance, with more service-related jobs requiring greater EI (Daus 2006). As
another example, a significant interaction between IQ and EI has been found, indicating that
employees lower in cognitive ability can compensate with greater EI (Côté and Miners 2006).

ANTECEDENTS OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

While no firm conclusions have yet been reached about the extent to which EI impacts
performance at work, many professionals have accepted that it is important, as evidenced by the
examples of its use in training and recruiting by Big 4 accounting firms as cited above and by the
fact that training in EI has become a multimillion-dollar business (Cherniss 2000). Thus, EI should
be included among the skills that a university education must foster in accounting students to
increase their ability to be successful in the profession. To even contemplate how a university
education can undertake to develop the EI of our students, it is first necessary to understand more
about the processes by which EI is developed and to ask whether a university education does not
already further that process.
Very little is known about the antecedents to EI. This fact notwithstanding, programs with the
goal of increasing the EI of the participants have been widely implemented in a variety of formats and

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venues, from programs at the grade school level to exercises in university classrooms to workplace
interventions. Unfortunately, most of these programs are not developed based on solid research, do
not proceed from carefully thought-out goals, and do not implement reasonable evaluation procedures
(Zeidner et al. 2009; Clarke 2006b). Thus, claims as to their effectiveness are difficult to support.
At the university level, most of the efforts to address EI have been exercises implemented as
part of one course (i.e., Morris et al. 2005; McPhail 2004). In one well-documented case, the impact
of a dramatic revamping of an entire M.B.A. program (complete with data from 20 years of
experience) has shown that the EI of the students can be impacted by an educational program
specifically designed to develop competencies in areas beyond the cognitive (Boyatzis et al. 2002;
Boyatzis and Saatcioglu 2008). Unfortunately, many changes were made in that program and it is
not completely clear which specific aspects resulted in the increase in EI. This leaves unanswered
the question of how to develop a targeted intervention focused on EI.
Clarke (2006b) has suggested workplace learning (the development of a competency, in this
case EI, through work experiences) rather than university education as the means of developing EI.
He does not, however, assume that simply performing the duties associated with any job will lead to
increases in EI, but believes that feedback, exchange of ideas, and opportunities for reflection must
be integrated into the process to be effective. There is a small amount of empirical research
supporting this viewpoint (Clarke 2006b). Of interest to this project is a study that investigated the
impact of an internship program (Beck and Halim 2008). The EI of the students did increase, but
only for those engaged in reflective learning (through the use of a journaling activity associated
with the internship experience).
In addition to the possibility that education and work experience increase EI, there may be
personal characteristics that limit acquisition of higher levels of EI. A construct from the
psychology literature that might have a limiting effect on EI is psychopathy. Psychopathy consists
of a pattern of callous affect and manipulative, irresponsible, and antisocial behavior (Hare 2003)
and has been found to predict violent recidivism in forensic populations (Harris et al. 1991) and, in
non-clinical samples, has been found to be significantly related to the use of deceptive sexual and
non-sexual tactics (Seto et al. 1997), self-reported sexual aggression (Kosson et al. 1997), infidelity
(Egan and Angus 2004), and antisocial behavior (Levenson et al. 1995).
Whereas high levels of EI have been touted as major contributors to workplace success, Babiak
and Hare (2006) have suggested that individuals with high levels of psychopathy are highly
detrimental to their employers and co-workers. In addition, psychopathy has been found to correlate
negatively with EI (Visser et al. 2010a). Further, evidence suggests that most interventions have not
been successful with psychopaths. For example, Rice et al. (1992) found that intensive therapeutic
treatment was associated with reduced violent recidivism for non-psychopathic offenders but with
increased violent recidivism for psychopathic offenders. Given that most researchers understand
psychopathy to be a continuous construct (e.g., Edens et al. 2006), such findings suggest that
non-clinical levels of psychopathy might be similarly resistant to intervention. Thus, for individuals
who score high on psychopathy, neither education nor work experience may be effective in
increasing their level of EI.
HYPOTHESES
Educational interventions intended specifically to increase the levels of EI of the students are
not uncommon.1 Most have been implemented at the primary or secondary level. However,
university-level courses in accounting have also reported on exercises or course components that
are intended to increase EI in the general sense (i.e., McPhail 2004; Morris et al. 2005; Myers and
Tucker 2005). The restructuring of the M.B.A. program mentioned earlier considered, among other

1
From this point forward, the abbreviation EI should be understood to mean Ability EI unless otherwise stated.

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things, the impact of the program on the EI of the students (Boyatzis and Saatcioglu 2008). Many of
these educational interventions have been criticized as not properly grounded in theory and poorly
evaluated. Therefore, accounting educators who wish to respond to the concerns of accounting
practitioners and other potential employers about the skills of accounting students should begin by
determining if a basic university education by itself (with no specific EI interventions) can be
expected to increase the EI of the students. Only after that question is answered should specific,
targeted interventions be considered. Thus, we begin by investigating the impact of a university
education on all students:
H1: The average EI score of the fourth-year students will exceed the average for the first-year
students.
Strong recommendations have been made that the softer skills of accounting students must be
improved (i.e., Albrecht and Sack 2000) and the competency maps of the major professional
organizations all contain references to skills, such as communication and team work, that are more
than just technical knowledge. In addition, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of
Business (AACSB) recommends that business programs should not limit required courses to those
in business. Students should receive what the AACSB (2010, 5) calls ‘‘a total educational
experience,’’ which should include courses in many disciplines, for example, communication,
philosophy, mathematics, and ecology (AACSB 2010). There is a long history of tension in
accounting education between this perceived need for a liberal arts education and the technical
education that is offered in many accounting programs (Nelson 1995).
Because a more liberal arts education may improve skills such as communication, critical
thinking, and ethical reasoning (AACSB 2010), it may be that a stronger liberal arts education
component in the accounting curriculum would produce more emotionally intelligent students. This
same implicit assumption is apparent in some of the classroom exercises that have been used in
accounting courses. Use of poetry and visual arts (Morris et al. 2005), trips to prisons and
interviews with those who have suffered the results of inadequately tested drugs (McPhail 2004),
and self-knowledge exercises (Litvin and Betters-Reed 2005) represent exercises that tend more
toward typical liberal arts education than more technical accounting education.
Examining the different impacts of a liberal education and an accounting education has been
done in prior accounting studies related to ethical development (Ponemon and Glazer 1990; Jeffrey
1993). For purposes of this study, ‘‘liberal arts’’ students are those students who are pursuing a
non-technical education in the humanities or the social sciences.
We hypothesize:
H2: The increase in EI scores from first- to fourth-year students is greater for liberal arts majors
than accounting majors.
H3: The increase in EI scores from first- to fourth year accounting students is greater in a
program that contains more required non-business courses.
In addition to the potential impact of a university education, it is possible that work experience
may affect the EI of students. There is significant and ongoing investigation into whether greater EI
results in a more productive workplace. Other than one study of the impact of internships on Trait
EI (Beck and Halim 2008), very little is known about the impact of workplace activities and events
(Clarke 2006b) on EI. To date, very few studies have investigated the ability of workplace learning
to impact EI and those have been related to professions that can be expected to have high emotional
impact, such as hospice staff (Clarke 2006a) or nurses (Akerjordet and Severinswon 2004). In the
latter study, the aspects of the workplace that were found to be most important in developing EI
were relationships with patients, relationships with coworkers, particularly supervisors, personal
motivation, and responsibilities. It has been proposed that the specific EI skills required and the

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events that may be encountered in a work setting with emotional content are industry-specific
(Lindebaum 2009). In accounting, it may be that client contact, the requirement to work often in a
team, and high levels of responsibility may be factors that might be expected to increase the
employees’ EI.
Lindebaum (2009) speculates that short-duration training cannot be expected to produce true
changes in EI. He believes growth in EI to be more likely caused by being forced to confront
difficult or painful experiences. If life experiences impact the development of EI, then those gained
at work may be of a different type than educational experiences and thus valuable in providing
another dimension for growth. It may also be the case that a professional environment such as
accounting may offer different types of experiences from other work environments. Note that this
hypothesis does not conflict with the previous hypotheses—it is possible that both the academic and
the work environments independently impact EI.
H4: Students with more work experience will score higher in EI.

METHODS
Participants were recruited at three universities: one in Canada, one in South Africa, and one in
the United States. At each location, first- and fourth-year accounting students and first- and
fourth-year liberal arts students were invited to participate. When recruiting liberal arts students,
care was taken to identify students from non-technical programs (humanities and social sciences
majors). Each participant was paid the equivalent of $10 Canadian. Table 1 contains demographic
information by university.
Each participant completed the electronic version of the MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso
Emotional Intelligence Test, an ability-based measure of EI), and the Self-Report Psychopathy-III
(SRP-III). In addition, participants provided information about their work experience and
demographic information such as major, year at university, gender, first language, and age. All
instruments for the study were only in English. Not all participants listed English as their first
language. However, all participants are students at a university where English is the language of
instruction and should thus have adequate command of the language for purposes of completing the
survey instruments.
The MSCEIT has been recommended by several authors as the best instrument for purposes of
evaluating educational interventions (e.g., Clarke 2006b; Lindebaum 2009). The MSCEIT requires
that respondents complete a variety of activities. For example, one section requires that respondents
recognize the emotion displayed on a facial expression. Another describes an event and asks
respondents to predict the emotional response of the actor. Administration of the MSCEIT results in
a total score as well as four Branch Scores: Perceiving Emotions, Facilitating Thought,
Understanding Emotions, and Managing Emotions. For this study, only the total score was used.
The scales are normalized so that the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. The MSCEIT
has been extensively validated (e.g., Brackett and Salovey 2006; see also Zeidner et al. [2009] for a
review of validation studies).
Psychopathy was measured with the Self-Report Psychopathy-III (SRP-III; Paulhus et al.
Forthcoming), a 64-item questionnaire yielding a total psychopathy score as well as four correlated
subscales (Interpersonal Manipulation, Callous Affect, Erratic Lifestyle, and Antisocial Behavior).
For the purposes of this study, only the total score was used in analyses. Participants responded on a
five-point scale from 1 (Disagree Strongly) to 5 (Agree Strongly). Scores were averaged such that
possible scores ranged from 1 to 5, with higher scores indicating higher levels of psychopathic
traits. The SRP-III has been shown to have good reliability (e.g., Visser et al. 2010b) and construct
validity (e.g., Williams et al. 2007).

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TABLE 1
Demographic Information by University

Panel A: Canadian University

Liberal Arts Accounting
First Year Fourth Year First Year Fourth Year
n 33 29 51 55
Gender—female 21 24 24 28
Gender—male 11 5 27 27
Age 19.06 (2.98) 23.28 (5.31) 18.96 (2.63) 22.65 (2.65)
Average EI 92.2 (16.2) 94.2 (19.5) 86.2 (14.4) 86.0 (17.1)
Average SRP 2.43 (0.55) 2.07 (0.50) 2.19 (0.32) 2.32 (0.46)

Panel B: U.S. University

Liberal Arts Accounting
First Year Fourth Year First Year Fourth Year
n 35 35 18 30
Gender—female 26 25 8 13
Gender—male 9 10 10 17
Age 18.97 (2.16) 21.69 (0.87) 18.67 (0.48) 22.53 (4.39)
Average EI 99.1 (13.0) 95.5 (11.5) 96.6 (9.8) 91.2 (15.8)
Average SRP 2.28 (0.47) 2.2 (0.38) 2.15 (0.35) 2.15 (0.42)

Panel C: South African University

Liberal Arts Accounting
First Year Fourth Year First Year Fourth Year
n 30 17 58 39
Gender—female 21 12 37 17
Gender—male 9 5 21 22
Age 19.27 (0.91) 22.53 (1.07) 18.22 (0.8) 21.51 (1.02)
Average EI 90.3 (13.0) 96.3 (12.1) 86.0 (14.7) 92.4 (12.2)
Average SRP 2.19 (0.42) 2.2 (0.38) 2.31 (0.38) 2.31 (0.41)
Numbers in parentheses are standard deviations.

Work experience was reported by time (number of months worked) as well as type. Participants
were asked to provide job titles as well as short descriptions of their duties. Each job was rated by
three of the researchers in four ways: high or low customer contact, high or low teamwork required,
high or low personal responsibility to be undertaken, and high or low professional environment.
These aspects of the work environment were chosen based on evidence from prior studies cited
above as well as an interest in the potential impact of a professional environment such as
accounting. Three of the authors independently rated each participant’s work experiences based on
job titles and descriptions provided and then met to resolve differences. Inter-rater agreement was
82 percent. Differences were resolved by comparing the description provided to other similar
descriptions and by referring to personal knowledge of related work environments. After the rating

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process was completed, the work experience variable was stated in months: for total work
experience, the variable was the total number of months; for each subcategory, the variable was
number of months in jobs high in the relevant type of work experience.

RESULTS
Descriptive information can be seen in Table 1. The developers of the instrument propose the
following guidelines for interpretation of MSCEIT scores: respondents with scores below 70 should
consider development, those between 70 and 89 should consider improvement, scores between 90
and 99 are considered in the low average range, and those between 100 and 109 are considered in
the high average range. Scores from 110 to 119 are considered competent and those above 120 tell
us that the respondent has a strength in the skill. For our sample, average scores on the MSCEIT for
most groups are in the lower average range (scores on the MSCEIT are normalized around an
average of 100). For some groups, scores fall into the range that would be identified as ‘‘consider
improvement.’’ None of the accounting student groups in this study have achieved an average level
of competence in EI. The SRP-III total mean (2.25) and standard deviation (0.43) in this study are
consistent with those reported in the literature in similar non-clinical samples (Jonason et al. 2009;
Visser et al. 2010b; Wheeler et al. 2009). The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the SRP-III total
score was 0.91, indicating excellent internal consistency.
Table 2 contains descriptive information for work experience. As can be seen, the students in
the South African school have substantially less work experience than those in the other two
schools. Interestingly, liberal arts students have more work experience than accounting students.
Not surprisingly, students have held jobs that require a good deal of contact with the clients, but
have less experience in jobs that require assuming a good deal of responsibility or in a professional
environment.
Table 3 contains a correlation matrix. Age was significantly and positively correlated with work
experience indicating that, unsurprisingly, older participants had greater work experience. Age was
unrelated to psychopathy or to EI suggesting that, at least in the limited age range of this sample, the
mere passage of time was not associated with different levels of these individual difference
variables. Work experience was significantly and positively correlated with EI, suggesting that
individuals with greater work experience also had higher levels of EI. Finally, psychopathy and EI
were significantly and negatively correlated, a finding discussed in detail in Visser et al. (2010a).
Table 4 contains an ANCOVA analysis for total score on the MSCEIT as the dependent
variable and all the independent variables of interest, including interactions. We include age and
gender as possible control variables. A consistent finding in the EI studies is that women score
slightly higher than do men (Zeidner et al. 2009). In addition, while age has not been found to
correlate with EI scores in adults, it was believed that it might provide an alternative explanation for
any results and is thus included as a control variable.
We examine H1 based on the results for the variable labeled Year (first year or fourth year). If a
university education produces an impact on EI, then we would expect that term in the model to be
significant. As can be seen, Year is not significant for the sample as a whole (p ¼ 0.721). There is no
evidence that a university education, in and of itself, increases the level of EI of the students.2

2
Had this variable been significant, we could have made no claim that a university education was the cause of any
increase observed. Given the results, i.e., no change in average EI scores between first- and fourth-year students, it
seems safe to conclude that a university education does not increase average EI scores. We remind readers that our
primary interest is in the result of accounting education. We included H1 to control for the possibility that a
university education increases EI and, thus, any changes produced by an accounting education could not be
conclusively shown to be anything more than any other type of university education.

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276 Cook, Bay, Visser, Myburgh, and Njoroge

TABLE 2
Work Experience in Months

Panel A: Canadian University

Liberal Arts Accounting
First Year Fourth Year First Year Fourth Year
Client Contact 33.40 39.71 17.67 31.85
Teamwork 12.61 24.69 8.67 19.24
Responsibility 15.09 23.79 3.98 7.25
Professional 6.91 4.76 2.74 10.27
Work Experience 44.42 49.91 33.57 44.44

Panel B: U.S. University

Liberal Arts Accounting
First Year Fourth Year First Year Fourth Year
Client Contact 38.98 52.80 18.72 34.23
Teamwork 11.97 17.63 9.50 20.70
Responsibility 22.37 19.68 6.00 14.40
Professional 4.68 6.86 1.06 14.00
Work Experience 43.21 62.56 27.72 52.60

Panel C: South African University

Liberal Arts Accounting
First Year Fourth Year First Year Fourth Year
Client Contact 10.20 32.59 3.16 11.31
Teamwork 3.97 8.24 2.55 6.56
Responsibility 0.40 20.12 0.76 4.40
Professional 0.77 6.00 0.09 0.58
Work Experience 12.52 38.29 4.09 14.77

TABLE 3
Correlation Table
Age Work Experience Psychopathy EI
Age 1.00
Work Experience 0.360* 1.00
(0.000)
Psychopathy 0.020 0.074 1.00
(0.685) (0.128)
EI 0.053 0.198* 0.406* 1.00
(0.271) (0.000) (0.000)
* Significant at the 0.000 level.
p-values are presented in parentheses.

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Emotional Intelligence: The Role of Accounting Education and Work Experience 277

TABLE 4
Preliminary ANCOVA Analysis
Source Type III Sum of Squares Df Mean Square F Sig.
a
Corrected Model 25941.476 15 1729.432 9.984 0.000
Intercept 58608.131 1 58608.131 338.360 0.000
School 1944.973 2 972.486 5.614 0.004
Year 22.172 1 22.172 0.128 0.721
Major 877.870 1 877.870 5.068 0.025
Gender 291.509 1 291.509 1.683 0.195
Age 0.075 1 0.075 0.000 0.983
Psychopathy 9922.760 1 9922.760 57.287 0.000
Work Experience (months) 1753.856 1 1753.856 10.125 0.002
School  Year  Major 436.506 4 109.126 0.630 0.641
Year  Major 58.841 1 58.841 0.340 0.560
School  Year 1802.435 2 901.218 5.203 0.006
Error 71536.776 413 173.213
Total 3649424.184 429
Corrected Total 97478.252 428
a 2
R ¼ 0.266, (Adjusted R2 ¼ 0.239).
The dependent variable in this analysis is EI. Independent variables are year at university (first or fourth), school
(Canada, South Africa, or U.S.), major (accounting or liberal arts), and work experience (in months). Control variables
are age, gender, and psychopathy.

We test H2 by examining the ANCOVA results for the interaction term for Major and Year. If
a liberal education is more effective than an accounting education, then we would expect that
interaction to be significant. There is no statistically significant interaction between Major and Year
(p ¼ 0.560). There is, however, a significant main effect for Major (p ¼ 0.025). This may indicate a
self-selection process. Students who enter the university with a higher level of EI may be more
likely to choose a liberal arts major than an accounting major. t-tests confirm this: at the first-year
level, liberal arts majors have a higher level of EI than accounting majors (p ¼ 0.001) and the same
is true for fourth-year students (p ¼ 0.009). However, there is no significant difference in the EI of
fourth-year liberal arts majors compared to first-year students. Thus, there is no support for the
hypothesis that a liberal education has a greater impact on EI than an accounting education.
In H3, we are only interested in the impact of different types of accounting programs. The
curriculum at the Canadian university is highly technical. The accounting students take very few
courses outside the Faculty of Business and those courses are likely to be economics or math
courses. The curriculum at the U.S. university requires that the students take many more general
education courses and fewer business courses. The curriculum at the South African university
requires more liberal education than that of the Canadian university, but fewer courses outside of
business than the U.S. university. Thus, if an accounting program containing a larger liberal arts
component does, in fact, increase the EI of the students, then we would expect the results for the
three schools to differ, with the U.S. school producing the greatest effect, the Canadian school
producing the least effect, and the South African school in the middle. We test this by repeating the
ANCOVA analysis, but only for the accounting students. The result is shown in Table 5. As can be
seen, there is a significant interaction between Year and School, indicating that the impact of an
accounting education is different for the three programs. Figure 1 contains a graph of the
interaction. The graph was prepared using marginal means for the three schools after controlling for
average levels of the control variables (Age and Gender). Tukey’s HSD tests (which do not include

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Volume 26, No. 2, 2011
278 Cook, Bay, Visser, Myburgh, and Njoroge

TABLE 5
ANCOVA Analysis for Accounting Students
Source Type III Sum of Squares Df Mean Square F Sig.
a
Corrected Model 16392.345 14 1170.882 6.955 0.000
Intercept 35380.771 1 35380.771 210.162 0.000
Age 109.712 1 109.712 0.652 0.420
Psychopathy 6554.822 1 6554.822 38.936 0.000
Work Experience (months) 1741.298 1 1741.298 10.343 0.001
School 2305.569 2 1152.785 6.848 0.001
Gender 4.695 1 4.695 0.028 0.868
Year 34.040 1 34.040 0.202 0.653
School  Gender 92.140 2 46.070 0.274 0.761
School  Year 907.862 2 453.931 2.696 0.070
Gender  Class 282.379 1 282.379 1.677 0.197
School  Gender  Class 433.546 2 216.773 1.288 0.278
Error 39730.587 236 168.350
Total 2022470.304 251
Corrected Total 56122.932 250
a 2
R ¼ 0.292, (Adjusted R2 ¼ 0.250).
Only accounting students are included. The dependent variable in this analysis is EI. Independent variables are year at
university (first or fourth), school (Canada, South Africa, or U.S.), and work experience (in months). Control variables
are age, gender, and psychopathy.

the effects of the control variables) indicate that, for the first-year students the average EI score is
higher (p ¼ 0.022 and p ¼ 0.017) in the U.S. school than in the other two schools. Tukey’s HSD
tests on the fourth-year students do not reach significance at traditional levels. However, the average
of the fourth-year students for the South African school is higher than that for both the U.S. and the
Canadian school and the difference approaches significance with respect to the Canadian school (p
¼ 0.103).
To analyze whether the effect is related to the accounting program or to the university where it
is located, the analysis is repeated for the liberal arts students. The ANCOVA is reported in Table 6
and Figure 2 contains a graph of the Year by School interaction. It must be emphasized that this
interaction is not significant for the liberal arts students—it is only shown for comparison purposes.
It can be seen that the pattern is not the same across the three universities. Thus, there is some effect
that relates specifically to accounting programs, rather than a general university effect. This could
relate to the types of students attracted to the programs, the types that self-select out of the
programs, or some specific aspect of the programs themselves.
Finally, we test H4 by examining the term in the ANCOVA for Work Experience. Work
Experience is a significant, positive predictor of EI (p ¼ 0.002). Similar analyses with the four
coded characteristics of work experience showed client contact (p ¼ 0.033) and responsibility (p ¼
0.058) to be significant, teamwork (p ¼ 0.162), and professional environment (p ¼ 0.302) to be
insignificant. There is strong evidence, therefore, that some aspects of work experience may
positively impact the level of EI.

DISCUSSION
The results of this study are cause for concern among accounting educators. In a nutshell, our
students lack a skill that accounting practitioners and other potential employers believe is important.

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Emotional Intelligence: The Role of Accounting Education and Work Experience 279

FIGURE 1
School by Year Interaction for Accounting Students

This figure is based on averages computed after controlling for average levels of covariates: age, psychopathy,
and work experience.

On average, accounting students in the three schools do not possess a level of EI that would qualify
them as competent in this skill. In addition, our data provide evidence of a self-selection process,
with accounting students having lower levels of EI than students in liberal arts programs. The
concern documented by Albrecht and Sack (2000), that the best and brightest are no longer being
attracted into accounting, is echoed by the findings in this study. Further, our students enter the
university lacking an important non-technical skill and neither university education in general nor
accounting education in particular can be conclusively shown to address this deficit.
The solution to the problem is not a simple one. In prior calls for increases in the non-technical
skills of accounting students, there has been an implicit assumption that a more liberal education
would produce the required results (e.g., Nelson 1995). However, there is no evidence in our study
to support this position with respect to EI. A more liberal education does not seem to be providing

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280 Cook, Bay, Visser, Myburgh, and Njoroge

TABLE 6
ANCOVA Analysis for Liberal Arts Students
Source Type III Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig.
a
Corrected Model 9464.037 14 676.003 3.912 0.000
Intercept 18207.537 1 18207.537 105.375 0.000
Age 124.622 1 124.622 0.721 0.397
Psychopathy 1943.513 1 1943.513 11.248 0.001
Work Experience (months) 150.255 1 150.255 0.870 0.352
School 1432.422 2 716.211 4.145 0.018
Gender 1414.401 1 1414.401 8.186 0.005
Year 273.029 1 273.029 1.580 0.211
School  Gender 788.573 2 394.287 2.282 0.105
School  Year 686.479 2 343.240 1.986 0.140
Gender  Year 246.489 1 246.489 1.427 0.234
School  Gender  Year 280.778 2 140.389 0.812 0.446
Error 28164.402 163 172.788
Total 1626953.880 178
Corrected Total 37628.439 177
a 2
R ¼ 0.252, (Adjusted R2 ¼ 0.187).
Only liberal arts students are included. The dependent variable in this analysis is EI. Independent variables are year at
university (first or fourth), school (Canada, South Africa, or U.S.), and work experience (in months). Control variables
are age, gender, and psychopathy.

its majors with improved levels of EI. This implies a need to implement educational interventions
specifically targeted at the improvement of levels of EI. In addition to the apparent failure of a more
liberal education to increase levels of EI in general, it may be important for accounting educators to
develop targeted interventions that meet the specific needs of accounting students. In the accounting
environment, the expression of emotions and functional responses to emotion-laden situations may
differ from what would be expected in other areas. Further, it may be true that a greater degree of
resilience is needed by accounting graduates to cope with a demanding job.
At a minimum, accounting educators may wish to evaluate how current curricula impact
students’ ability to develop EI and other softer skills. Does our emphasis on rational decision
making have the impact of communicating to students that emotions have no place in business,
causing them to discount their own and others’ emotions and the potential benefits of understanding
and better managing those emotions? Has our rush to join the technology era resulted in fewer
opportunities for our students to develop non-technology based skills?
Only one university in the study can claim to have fourth-year students who have higher levels
of EI than do the first-year students. This university does not have a stronger liberal arts component
than the other two. It also is not the university with the smallest class sizes. However, the
accounting program at that university had recently implemented a program intended to reduce
attrition among accounting students. That program explicitly recognized emotional issues as one of
the reasons for failure by students to complete their degree. The program implemented
supplemental tutorial classes intended to increase study skills and address a retention rate that
was seen as too low. These new classes were smaller than the usual classes, more student-centered,
and involved more active learning. In addition, one-on-one sessions with tutors were offered to
students still experiencing problems. It seems possible that this extra effort on the part of the
program, in addition to reducing attrition, had the effect of increasing the students’ EI.

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Emotional Intelligence: The Role of Accounting Education and Work Experience 281

FIGURE 2
School by Year Interaction for Liberal Arts Students

This figure is based on averages computed after controlling for average levels of covariates: age, psychopathy,
and work experience. Further, it should be noted that this graph is based on an interaction that was not found to
be statistically significant. It is shown for comparison purposes.

The finding that students with more work experience, especially of the type that requires
customer contact and acceptance of high levels of responsibility, score higher on a test of EI can be
interpreted in two ways: it may be true that work experiences serve to provide growth opportunities
for the development of EI or students with higher levels of EI may be more likely to get and be able
to keep jobs that demand these skills. This finding indicates that co-op programs, internships, or
service-learning programs have the potential to be beneficial. At the very least, if carefully
monitored, they might assist educators in identifying students who need work in the area of EI.
Alternatively, they may assist all students in developing better abilities to understand and manage
their own emotions and to more effectively respond to the emotions of others. In either case, it
seems likely that any program of this type will be more effective in increasing EI if it includes a

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282 Cook, Bay, Visser, Myburgh, and Njoroge

reflective learning component or if employers are encouraged to provide feedback to the student
about their performance in softer skills areas rather than just about their technical competence.
It may seem that this study provides few answers. We acknowledge that to be true. EI is still a
relatively new construct and much research remains to be done. We chose three schools based
primarily on their varying degrees of liberal arts components in their accounting programs. It may
be that other schools with different characteristics would show different patterns in the EI of their
students. For example, the U.S. school is a small liberal arts school in the Midwest. We might not
observe the same pattern in the levels of EI of students at a large, urban university in the eastern
U.S. Further, we can provide only vague suggestions about how to increase EI based on the limited
findings in the South African school. However, clearly something is different in that school and
there is the possibility that educators could learn from its experience. Future research will be
required to identify educational interventions that effectively address the deficit in EI skills that
have been found by practitioners and this study.
In spite of these issues, we believe this study to be an important and indispensible step. We
have identified a problem and have shown that in none of the schools does a university education
have a positive impact on the EI of the students. Further, only one accounting program in the range
of programs had a positive impact on students’ EI. Thus, any accounting program that intends to
respond to the calls from practice for students with this skill must develop a targeted intervention
that takes into account the starting point of its students as well as how the intervention may
differentially impact various subgroups of students.
This study has certain limitations. The data generated for this study are cross-sectional, thus
limiting our ability to make causal inferences about differences in EI. However, the data were
gathered at three different universities and included students from a variety of majors. If the general
outcome of a university education was to increase the EI of the students, then one would expect that
fourth-year students would, on average, have higher scores than first-year students. There is no
indication that this is the case in our data.
A further limitation relates to the sample. This is a convenience sample and consists of students
from only three universities. While this research design is often used, questions about generalizing
from our sample to other student populations could arise. In particular, the sample size for the
accounting students at the U.S. university is quite small. However, that program is very small. Thus,
the sample, while small, does account for nearly half of the entire student population, limiting the
possibility that the sample is not representative.
Due to our belief that a more liberal arts-oriented program would be more effective at
increasing the EI of the students, we included in our sample respondents from three universities that
varied on that dimension, and where we could make contacts to assist in data gathering. While not
our intention, the result was that our sample was drawn from three different universities in three
different countries. Thus, the effect that we found for the accounting program in South Africa could
be a result of the culture at that university rather than the accounting program. The analyses with the
sample partitioned by major provide some evidence not only that the accounting programs at the
three universities might be different from the liberal arts programs, but also that the accounting
programs differ between the schools. The significant year-by-school interaction found for
accounting students was not present for liberal arts students. If the effect was due solely to culture at
the three universities, then the interaction would have been consistent across programs. That is not
to say that culture does not play a role. While we found no studies that show such an effect, it may
be the case that culture impacts both the timing and the level of the development of EI, as well as
the effect that education may have on this development.
The supplementary analysis partitioned by major has another interesting implication. It
provides some evidence that accounting students across the three schools might differ
systematically from liberal arts students. For example, work experience has a significant effect

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Emotional Intelligence: The Role of Accounting Education and Work Experience 283

on the EI of the accounting students but not the liberal arts students. It may be that accounting
students see themselves as future business people and thus approach their work experience more
thoughtfully, whereas liberal arts students view their work experience as just a job to be done to
provide for themselves financially.
Finally, we motivated the study, in part, by drawing a link between EI and the skills that are
often termed ‘‘soft skills,’’ which are specified in, for example, the Core Competency Framework of
the AICPA. Some links between EI and these skills have been found (e.g., for leadership and
teamwork) as reported in the literature review. Others, however, such as interaction skills and
communication abilities have simply been assumed as part of the definition of the construct. To the
degree that EI does not predict better communication or better client interaction skills, our
motivation loses force. However, it should be noted that some accounting firms and other potential
employers, also as cited above, are specifically calling for employees with EI. Future research is
required to determine the levels of EI of practicing accountants, how higher EI may have impacted
the careers of those with that skill, and whether they feel they received adequate training either at
their respective universities or in continuing education programs.

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