General Factor of Personality is the same as Emotional Intelligence

Hmm. Interesting. The question is whether there is something independent called Emotion Quotient that has strong or better forecasting capability, independent of the more traditional general factor of personality (GFP). GFP is the measured aspect of the Big Five model which proposes that there are five basic personality traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience.

Claims about EQ have been a common claim for some time and it makes intuitive sense. There is a population who philosophically oppose the implications of IQ and dispute its reliability as a forecaster of outcomes despite the robustness of that data. As a corollary to their IQ opposition, it seems as if they have conjured the idea of Emotion Quotient (EQ). You may be smart but do you have the emotional attributes that allows you to generate benefits from that smartness. The vernacular trope might be captured as "He's book smart but not street smart." This line of thought argues that you have to look at both IQ and EQ. Fair enough.

However, psychologists and others have countered that EQ is simply a reformulation of GFP, that EQ has no independent forecasting capacity above that which is already available via GFP.

From Overlap Between the General Factor of Personality and Emotional Intelligence: A Meta-Analysis by van der Linden, Dimitri, et al.

We examine the relationship between the general factor of personality (GFP) and emotional intelligence (EI) and specifically test the hypothesis that the GFP is a social effectiveness factor overlapping conceptually with EI. Presented is an extensive meta-analysis in which the associations between the GFP, extracted from the Big Five dimensions, with various EI measures is examined. Based on a total sample of k = 142 data sources (N = 36,268) the 2 major findings from the meta-analysis were (a) a large overlap between the GFP and trait EI (r ≈ .85); and (b) a positive, but more moderate, correlation with ability EI (r ≈ .28). These findings show that high-GFP individuals score higher on trait and ability EI, supporting the notion that the GFP is a social effectiveness factor. The findings also suggest that the GFP is very similar, perhaps even synonymous, to trait EI. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

It's meta-analysis which I think always requires special caution not to overweight validity. None-the-less, interesting.