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Managerial interpersonal skills (MIPS) are widely considered important for management development, yet the nature of MIPS has eluded researchers. The purpose of this paper is to propose five MIPS core skills, giving attention to the role of context, the relationship of MIPS to traits, and implications for training design, assessment and evaluation.

The authors interweave a discussion forum of domain experts (Hillary Anger-Elfenbein, Timothy Baldwin, Paulo Lopes, Bronston T. Mayes, Ronald Riggio, Robert Rubin and David Whetten) with research commentary and implications for management development. The discussion focussed on: first, how do we define MIPS? Second, how important is context for defining, assessing or developing MIPS? Third, are MIPS traits, or skills that can be developed?

The authors propose MIPS include five core skills that sequentially build upon one another: managing-self, communicating, supporting, motivating and managing conflict. Although context may impact the importance of each skill across cultures, situations and jobs, the authors offer these skills as a useful starting point for MIPS assessment, training design and evaluation.

The proposed five core skill model for MIPS needs further research and psychometric validation.

By proposing MIPS include five specific trainable skills that are relevant across contexts, this paper advances MIPS research, assessment and development.

Emotional appraisal is an act of sense making: What does a particular event mean for me? It is not the event itself – but rather an individual's subjective evaluation of the event – that elicits and shapes emotions (Scherer, 1997b). Thus, appraisal is the crucial first step in the emotion process, and describes how we attend, interpret and ascribe meaning to a given event or stimulus. First, emotional appraisal requires attention; given cognitive limits, we must prioritize which events are even worthy of our notice. Second, we must code the event, interpreting its meaning, and in particular its implications for the self (Mesquita & Frijda, 1992). If another person in a team environment is being rude, how one interprets the personal significance of this behavior may change significantly the emotional response – for example, whether the rude individual is a teammate, a customer, a supplier, or a competitor, and whether the rude behavior is directed at an innocent bystander or an instigator. Likewise, a bear approaching a campsite may elicit fear, but the same bear in a zoo could result in delight. Often the cognitive evaluation of stimuli associated with emotional appraisal occurs so quickly and automatically, before our conscious awareness, that we may be unaware of this individual component of the unfolding process. However, even in such cases, we can see the role of appraisal processes by examining, for example, how emotional reactions change over time and vary from person to person. An event that may have caused great embarrassment during youth might in adulthood leave one unfazed, and an event that makes one person angry might make another person sad. Indeed, it can be the lack of conscious awareness of the appraisal process – and the sense that appraisal is clear and lacking a subjective interpretive lens – that prevents individuals from questioning and evaluating it. This results in a particular challenge to reconciling colleagues’ often vastly differing emotional appraisals.

This study aims to test negotiation outcomes when bilinguals negotiate in a foreign rather than their native language. Decision research on the foreign language effect indicates that bilingual individuals may be less susceptible to framing bias when using a foreign language because they make less emotional and biased choices. With increasing international business activity, there is a pressing need to examine the effect of language on bilingual negotiators.

The authors tested the hypotheses using a two (task frame: gain vs loss) × 2 (language: foreign vs native) factorial design recruiting 246 Korean–English bilinguals. A negotiation simulation with three issues was used, and participants exchanged offers with a preprogrammed computer they believed to be a real counterpart.

There was no significant interaction effect between framing and language on the offers made, but the framing effect was mitigated and nonsignificant for negotiators who used their foreign language. The interaction between framing and language conditions significantly affected negotiators’ positive emotions and satisfaction with the negotiation.

The uniqueness of this paper is related to its effort to investigate the effect of negotiation language on a negotiator’s decision-making. Considering globalization and the increasing prevalence of international negotiations, this paper has implications for researchers and practitioners.

As a departure from past research on emotional intelligence (EI), which generally examines the influence of an individual's level of EI on that individual's consequences, we examined relationships between the emotional intelligence (EI) of both members of dyads involved in a negotiation in order to explain objective and subjective outcomes. As expected, individuals high in EI reported a more positive experience. However, surprisingly, such individuals also achieved significantly lower objective scores than their counterparts. By contrast, having a partner high in EI predicted greater objective gain, and a more positive negotiating experience. Thus, high EI individuals appeared to benefit in affective terms, but appeared to create objective value that they were less able to claim. We discuss the tension between creating and claiming value, and implications for emotion in organizations.

Teams’ emotional skills can be more than the sum of their individual parts. Although theory emphasizes emotion as an interpersonal adaptation, emotion recognition skill has long been conceptualized as an individual-level intelligence. We introduce the construct of team emotion recognition accuracy (TERA) – the ability of members to recognize teammates’ emotions – and present preliminary evidence for its predictive validity. In a field study of public service interns working full-time in randomly assigned teams, taken together positive and negative TERA measured at the time of team formation accounted for 28.1% of the variance in team performance ratings nearly a year later.