Featured Assessment: The Attentional and Interpersonal Style Inventory (TAIS)

The Attentional and Interpersonal Style (TAIS) Inventory by Dr. Robert Nideffer is a 144-item self-report inventory that aids in performance appraisals, talent identification, and professional development by measuring the building blocks of performance issues: concentration and interpersonal skills. The TAIS assessment is supported by more than 25 years of research and has a long history of use in business, sales, management, military, research, education, and sports situations. 

In collaboration with Dr. Nideffer, MHS recently released a new Technical Manual — the first comprehensive TAIS documentation available. We believe that this manual will be a great resource for those who already use TAIS, as well as a means for new users to easily pick up the tool. TAIS is a perfect complement to other EI assessments as it identifies the environmental and interpersonal situations that increase a respondent’s emotional arousal, allowing behavioral interventions to be tailored to improve performance. 

The TAIS assessment and its reports are available online via MHS Scoring Organizer. A TAIS assessment includes a set of eight reports which assess abilities in a specific performance context, such as sales, leadership, or interpersonal interaction. In addition to a standard normative sample, you can choose to score results against twenty different comparative populations (including engineers, law enforcement, finance, sales, athletes, CEOs, and managers) to fully customize your coaching plan.

If you are interested in becoming certified to use the TAIS assessment, please contact workshops@mhs.com.

Emotional Intelligence on and off the Pitch at the Southampton Football Club

This month we have another update from Malcom Frame, Sports Psychologist at the Southampton Football Club (recently an English Premier league side, now in the Championship battling to regain their top flight status), who took some time to chat with Paul Vella from the MHS UK office about how Southampton has been using the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i^®) with their academy starlets.

Southampton FC Academy has a fantastic reputation in the UK for developing its young talent. It has been one of the top Academies in the country for the last six years and is innovative in its approach in working with its young players and endeavours to provide an environment that helps these players actualize their potential. It has a holistic approach to performance and understands the need of the players to develop their game intelligence in combination with their Emotional Intelligence which is deemed to be imperative in how they manage their performance and career most effectively.

Southampton have been administering EQ-i’s to academy players in the 16 – 18 category, both home grown youngsters and also those from the continent (taking advantage of the various language translations the EQ-i is available in). Alongside MHS, they are looking to build a reliable process to enable them to educate the players coming through the academy, to develop their potential to the full. Having sat the assessment, players are scheduled a private 1:1 feedback session with Malcolm, who aims to use the assessment to help them to increase their self-awareness and develop their Emotional Intelligence to support how they perform on the pitch and interact with others off it.

Malcolm explained that he feels Emotional Intelligence skills are key for those progressing through the academy, on the pitch – in terms of areas such as performing under pressure, supporting team members and showing leadership skills. Off the pitch, it was explained that players need to know how to conduct and “sell” themselves within the club. They have to deal with a variety of staff – coaches, psychologists, health and fitness professional, senior players etc; and how they project their own “brand” is integral to their progression.

Certain patterns have so far emerged within this cohort – with players generally showing higher levels of intra-personal intelligence, lower levels of adaptability and to a lesser extent, inter-personal skills. Malcolm commented that a number of the academy players have relatively high levels of self regard and self-actualization. He feels this may be on account of them having so far fulfilled their ambitions by reaching the academy. He feels that lower levels of adaptability combined with higher intra-personal intelligence suggest that players may be emotionally aware of a situation but may not have the resources to deal with it – resulting in avoidance. Because there is a strong culture of promoting the notion of “mental toughness” in soccer, players in need of help may be reluctant to ask for it in case their pleas are seen as indicators of weakness.

Another pattern to emerge with some has been a high self regard vs. low social responsibility combination – producing a caveat on the players’ ability to integrate cohesively into the team and management structures and suggesting a risk of high levels of ego orientation. The academy sees emotions as being contagious; that if players understand team members’ needs this triggers a togetherness and supportive culture which in turn breeds success on the pitch. Therefore they are looking to develop interpersonal areas in the players such as empathy and social responsibility. The academy also feel that emotional functioning has a direct impact on rest and recovery of players; that the emotional part of the brain is the resource centre of the person and that emotional and psychological demands directly impact on players recovery times.

In summary, Southampton are looking to use the EQ-i to cultivate a positive, supportive culture among their players by focusing on the individual’s emotional, mental and physical needs, which will in turn support them to be successful at individual and collective levels. They are looking to recognize those players who have high intra and inter personal skills as they see them as having potential to be good leaders.

The club is also looking to use Emotional Intelligence testing at the recruitment level for new players coming in to the academy. The club’s view is that if it supports the players’ needs, they will become confident players and that a confident player is more likely to be a supportive player, which in turn relates to a confident team. In partnership with MHS, Southampton is looking at investigating the relationships between a number of performance variables within the academy and EQ-i profiles. Hopefully MHS will be able to share some details of those studies in future editions of the EI Insider.

Do Sports Teams Need EI More than Individual Athletes?

Do athletes who choose more interactive sports have higher EQ’s than athletes choosing solo sports? This month we bring you news of a recent study by Robert Lockwood and Colleen Henry (supervised by Dr. Boyce Jubilan) at De Sales University in Pennsylvania, which examined the relationship between Emotional Intelligence and the type of sports a person plays. Lockwood and Henry used the MSCEIT^™ and the EQ-i^® to test 38 undergraduate student athletes (19 men and 19 women). The idea behind the study was that individuals with lower EQ scores could benefit developmentally by being involved in more interactive situations.

The groups involved were from the university’s men’s and women’s soccer and cross-country running teams. The researchers discovered differences between the athletes on four of the EQ-i scales. Soccer players had higher self-regard, social responsibility, general mood, and happiness than cross-country team members. Soccer players scored higher on the MSCEIT’s emotional experiencing and emotional reasoning tasks, as well as the perceiving emotions and using emotions branches, while cross-country runners scored higher on the understanding emotions branch.

Generally speaking, the soccer players were found to have higher Emotional Intelligence scores than cross-country athletes. Aligning soccer with team sports and cross-country running with individual sports, the authors point out that Emotional Intelligence may have greater importance in team sports. Future studies may look at the impact of integrating EI training into traditional sport skill training regimens on team and sport performance.

Emotional Intelligence and sport

Malcolm Frame, a sports psychologist at a leading Football League Championship club in England, has first-hand experience with the benefits of high Emotional Intelligence in competitive environments. He recently found time to sit down with Paul Vella from the MHS UK office to discuss how he first discovered the applications of EI in professional sport and how he uses them in his day to day work with teams. “I first turned to Emotional Intelligence for sports application after beginning to look at what made someone great. It wasn’t always about technical skill, and was often more about motivation/desire and other factors.”

As a sports psychologist, Malcolm is responsible for the brains behind each player’s brawn. “The main question I would get asked from coaches was ‘how can you make this player mentally tough?’ In looking at the research I found that mental toughness was directly related to EI.”

Within the framework of EI, the research that Malcolm consulted identified two key areas: self-belief and emotional resiliency. These areas were found to be key in things like dealing with adversity, wrong decisions and going behind.

In his own experience, Malcolm has found that it is not only the player’s Emotional Intelligence that is of concern but also that of the coach. “From my observations, coaches tend to be strong at looking at technical and tactical areas but are uncomfortable around the emotional area,” he noted. “One coach didn’t know what to do with an under performing player but hadn’t asked him what was going on for him. So part of the problem was that they were trying to tell the player what should happen rather than engage the player in the process. The player hadn’t been engaged at an emotional level so it was difficult for that player to move forward.”

Malcolm has found EI assessment useful for further refining his psychological and emotional work with the players. “Emotions are a key driver in all aspects of player performance and by undertaking their emotional profile you can free up some aspects that are blocking their potential. I feel that for the players the intrapersonal area is key, for the coaches, interpersonal.”

Malcolm feels that Emotional Intelligence can be a big differentiator between those young players coming into the academy and subsequently progressing further and those dropping out. Malcolm quotes Bill Beswick, a sports psychologist with the England football team, stating “ability has got you this far, character will get you the rest of the way.” Malcolm feels that EI is a huge part of that character Bill refers to. He also believes that developing players’ Emotional Intelligence could potentially make the difference between success and failure where the margins are tight, for example in cup finals or penalty shootouts. “I’m in no doubt that such things as reacting under pressure and keeping momentum are linked to Emotional Intelligence and by increasing a players’ Emotional Intelligence the difference between success and failure can be further bridged.”