Validation of the wong and law emotional intelligence scale for Chilean managers

The Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale, WLEIS, is one of the most widely used instruments for measuring emotional intelligence in the world. This scale was designed for the work context and evaluates the assessment and expression of a person’s emotions, the assessment and recognition of emotions in others, the regulation of a person’s emotions, and the use of emotion to aid performance. However, in the Chilean context, there have been no studies on the validity of WLEIS for senior management within firms. The present study seeks to obtain evidence of validity based on WLEIS’ internal structure using a sample of 100 Chilean managers. This is an instrumental type study. An exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis corroborated the dimensions of WLEIS, which presented adequate levels of reliability. The average scores in the factors were then compared according to age, sex, and level of educational. The implications of these findings are discussed in the last section.