Introduction: The Emotional Intelligence Imperative

Emotional intelligence has become a cornerstone of business education and leadership development. From CASEL’s five competencies to the OECD’s socio-emotional skills frameworks, from corporate training programs to MBA curricula, the language of self-awareness, self-management, empathy and interpersonal effectiveness is reaching much greater prominence in discussions of what makes effective leaders.

The case for emotional intelligence in business is compelling. Research consistently demonstrates that leaders with strong emotional capacities outperform their peers, that organisations with emotionally intelligent cultures show greater innovation and resilience and that the complex, interconnected challenges of contemporary business require more than technical expertise, they demand the ability to navigate relationships, manage conflict, inspire teams and make decisions that account for human and social dimensions.

In an era of polycrisis, characterised by converging climate, economic, social and geopolitical challenges, the ability to manage uncertainty, build trust across differences and lead with both competence and care is not optional. It is essential for business survival and for addressing the global risks the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are designed to address.

Yet beneath this consensus lies a troubling paradox: the dominant frameworks for emotional intelligence in business education may be reinforcing the very systems that created our current crises.

Despite widespread adoption of emotional intelligence training, we continue to see:

• Leadership failures rooted in extraction, short-termism and low regard for stakeholder wellbeing
• Organisational cultures that burn out employees while demanding “resilience”
• Business models that extract value from communities and ecosystems while claiming to care about “people and planet”
• Widening inequality even as businesses trumpet their commitment to “diversity and inclusion”

Emotional life becomes a site of regulation and optimisation, a moralised performance of composure that conceals systemic harm. This is the emotional intelligence paradox: frameworks designed to humanise business that often function to optimise human capital for extractive purposes; pedagogies of care that operate as technologies of control; promises of responsibility that perpetuate systems of harm.

This position paper examines why dominant approaches to emotional intelligence, from CASEL to OECD frameworks to corporate EI training programs, fall short of their aspirations in the context of business education. More importantly, it proposes an alternative: Critical and Relational Capacities for Responsible Leadership, a framework aligned with the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and designed for navigating the uncertainties of the polycrisis.

Why Emotional Intelligence Matters: But Not As Currently Conceived

The Legitimate Case for Emotional Capacity

Before critiquing current approaches, we must acknowledge what they get right: emotional and social capacities are fundamental to effective leadership and essential for navigating the uncertainties businesses face.

The polycrisis confronting us: climate breakdown, social fragmentation, economic instability, technological disruption, represents unprecedented levels of complexity and uncertainty. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report consistently identifies interconnected crises that resist technical solutions and demand new forms of leadership (WEF, 2023).

Uncertainty is endemic to business, but its character has shifted. Where once organisations operated within relatively predictable VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) environments punctuated by periods of stability, we now face BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) conditions where uncertainty is the new normal. Traditional management approaches, emphasising exploitation of existing knowledge, optimisation of known processes and minimisation of risk, are insufficient.

The central challenge for business education is therefore to help students navigate uncertainty. Indeed this is a core aim of any type of education, as human flourishing depends on our capacity to predict, estimate and respond to uncertainty. This capacity is not purely cognitive or technical, it is fundamentally emotional, relational (interconnected) and embodied.

Effective leadership today requires:

• Self-awareness to recognise how one’s own emotions, biases and assumptions shape perception and decision-making
• Relational capacity to build trust, facilitate dialogue and collaborate across different ways of being
• Ethical discernment to make decisions that account for multiple stakeholders and long-term consequences
• Adaptive flexibility to respond creatively to novel situations rather than defaulting to familiar patterns
• Systemic thinking to understand how individual actions connect to larger patterns and impacts

These are indeed emotional and social capacities. The question is: What (un)kind of emotional intelligence are we cultivating and toward what ends?

The “Soft Skills” Trap

The growing emphasis on emotional intelligence in business education reflects recognition that technical expertise alone is insufficient. But the framing of these capacities as “soft skills”, complementary to the “hard skills” of finance, operations and strategy, is itself revealing.

This language hierarchy (hard/soft) positions emotional and social capacities as:

• Secondary to “real” business knowledge
• Nice-to-have rather than essential
• Feminine-coded in contrast to masculine rationality
• Individual traits rather than organisational practices or systemic conditions

More problematically, the soft skills discourse often instrumentalises emotional capacity: emotional intelligence becomes valuable primarily insofar as it enhances performance, increases productivity, facilitates influence or improves the bottom line. Emotions are positioned as resources to be managed for strategic advantage.

This instrumental framing “emotional intelligence in service of business success” risks reproducing the very mindset that PRME seeks to transform. If the purpose of developing emotional capacity is to be more effective at extractive capitalism, we have merely created more sophisticated tools for a fundamentally problematic system and co-opted alternative narratives that could have facilitated a new way of working, repositioning them within existing paradigms.

The Problem with Dominant Emotional Intelligence Frameworks

The Architecture of Extraction

Emotional intelligence frameworks in business education are not neutral tools for professional development; they are, as critical scholars of SEL note, architectures of control. They codify assumptions about what emotion is, what the self is and what constitutes “appropriate” affect in ways that reflect the moral logic of the market. What appears as care often functions as governance: a pedagogy of emotional composure that maintains organisational order while masking structural harm. Business education’s emotional intelligence models, if based on dominant frameworks, replicate this architecture, they individualise selfhood, privatise emotion, instrumentalise wellbeing, moralise compliance, universalise heterogeneous norms and quantify affect. Each dimension then serves to depoliticise emotion and so secure organisational governance.

Whether we examine CASEL’s five competencies, the OECD’s socio-emotional skills frameworks, corporate emotional intelligence training programs or WHO wellbeing models, we find remarkable consistency in their underlying assumptions. These frameworks emerge from psychological research conducted primarily in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) contexts and share an epistemic architecture built on:

Dimension	Dominant Framework Assumption	What This Erases or Enables
Selfhood	The individual is an autonomous, self-regulating agent	Erases relational, cultural, systemic interdependence; enables individualisation of structural problems, they are “personal flaws”
Emotion	Emotions are discrete internal states to identify, understand and control	Devalues political, cultural, embodied dimensions; treats emotions as personal rather than responses to conditions
Purpose	Emotional competence enhances individual performance and organizational productivity	Instrumentalises and commodifies wellbeing; positions emotional capacity as human capital to optimise, the self as a project not subject
Ethics	“Good” emotional intelligence involves regulation, positivity and appropriate expression	Privileges conformity; suppresses dissent, anger, grief as “unprofessional”
Universality	Competencies apply equally across cultures, ways of being and contexts	Re-centres Western ableist norms; pathologises cultural difference as well as different ways of thinking and being
Measurement	Emotional capacities are observable, quantifiable and assessable	Enables surveillance; reduces complexity to metrics; creates sorting mechanisms

These are not minor implementation issues. They reflect a worldview, a type of neoliberal emotional governance, that treats emotions as standardisable, individual assets requiring optimisation for market performance.

Alignment with Extractive Business Logic

The dominant emotional intelligence frameworks in business education are deeply aligned with the neoliberal capitalism that characterises extractive business models. This alignment is not coincidental, many of these frameworks were developed explicitly to serve organisational performance goals, to squeeze every ounce of optimisation from employees.

Quantification and commodification of emotional capacity

Just as neoliberalism treats nature as “natural capital” and relationships as “social capital,” dominant EI frameworks treat emotional capacity as “human capital” to be measured, developed and deployed for competitive advantage. Students learn to think of their emotional intelligence as an asset they possess, a skill set they can market, a form of personal value they must optimise.

This commodification manifests in:

• EI assessments that produce scores and rankings
• “Emotional intelligence quotient” (EQ) as parallel to IQ
• LinkedIn profiles listing EI as a competency
• Executive coaching that promises to “level up” your emotional intelligence
• Training programs measured by ROI and performance metrics

The result: emotional capacity becomes another arena for individual competition and accumulation rather than collective flourishing.

Individual responsibility for structural problems

By emphasising individual self-awareness, self-management and personal development, dominant frameworks locate both problems and solutions within the individual. If you struggle at work, the solution is better emotional self-regulation or more grit, not examining toxic organisational cultures, exploitative labour practices, inadequate compensation or systemic discrimination. This neoliberal ideal valorises endurance over transformation, conditioning future leaders to absorb rather than resist harm. Emotional intelligence thus trains the “resilient subject”: one who endures and adjusts to crises rather than possessing the political agency to transform the conditions that produce them.

This individualisation is particularly damaging in business education because it prepares students to:

• Accept sole responsibility for their own “success” or “failure” regardless of structural barriers or leg-ups
• View leadership as individual capacity rather than collective practice
• Frame organisational problems as people problems (lacking EI) rather than system problems
• Believe they (and/or others) can individually succeed within broken systems if they (and/or others) just develop sufficient emotional intelligence

The “bootstrapping ethos” of emotional intelligence is especially harmful for students from marginalised backgrounds who face structural barriers that no amount of personal emotional development can overcome.

Creating the “resilient” extractive leader

Perhaps most important to consider is how dominant EI frameworks cultivate at type of extractive resilience: the capacity to maintain performance and positivity despite harmful conditions, to adapt to injustice rather than resist it, to endure and even thrive within systems that cause suffering.

The ideal leader produced by these frameworks is one who:

• Remains calm and composed under any pressure
• “Bounces back” quickly from setbacks
• Maintains team morale despite poor conditions
• Manages their own stress rather than challenging the sources of that stress
• Demonstrates “grit” and perseverance through adversity
• Keeps emotions “professional” (positive, regulated, non-disruptive)

This is the neoliberal dream: leaders who can extract maximum productivity from themselves and others while maintaining the appearance of care and wellbeing. Resilience becomes a mechanism for adapting to exploitation rather than a foundation for transformation.

The language of “stress management” and “work-life balance” exemplifies this problem. Rather than questioning why work is structured to be inherently stressful and life/soul-destroying (!), students learn techniques to personally manage the fallout. The system remains unquestioned; individuals adjust.

Emotional labour and performativity

Dominant frameworks also normalise emotional labour, the work of managing one’s emotional expression to meet organisational expectations and norms. This is particularly problematic because:

• Emotional labour is gendered, racialized and classed (certain people are expected to do more of it)
• It can be exhausting, alienating (performing emotions you don’t feel) and damaging (camouflaging and masking)
• It privileges conformity over authenticity
• It serves organisational goals rather than human flourishing

Business students learn to “manage impressions,” to display appropriate emotions regardless of genuine feeling, to navigate “emotional politics” in organisations. This is framed as savvy professional development, but it teaches performativity over integrity, image management over authentic relating. I wear my mask and do not let it slip.

Surveillance and quantification of affect

With the increase focus on EI we are also witnessing a “Precision Management Governance” movement in which wearable tech, sentiment analytics and AI coaching extend surveillance into the affective realm. The rhetoric of personalised development disguises new mechanisms of emotional governance, where wellbeing is both monitored and monetised. Increasingly, we see dominant EI frameworks incorporate technological assessment and monitoring tools:

• Personality and EI assessments (often with proprietary algorithms)
• 360-degree feedback systems tracking emotional and social behaviours
• Sentiment analysis tools monitoring team dynamics
• Wearables tracking stress and engagement (!!)
• AI-powered coaching applications

This datafication of emotional life enables a greater organisational surveillance and control. Surveillance is not support. What began as developmental support becomes a mechanism for sorting, evaluating and managing employees as human capital. The promise of “personalised development” often functions as individualised optimisation for organisational benefit.

The WEIRDness and Universality Problem

When dominant frameworks claim universality, presenting competencies as equally applicable across all cultural contexts, they mask their cultural specificity. Emotion regulation strategies, expressions of care, communication styles and definitions of effective leadership vary significantly across cultural contexts.

What CASEL, OECD and corporate frameworks name as “healthy” emotional intelligence often reflects what might be perceived a predominantly Western individualist values:

• Self-expression over relational harmony
• Assertiveness over collective decision-making
• Individual achievement over group success
• Direct communication over contextual understanding
• Emotional transparency over appropriate reserve

In collectivist cultures (itself a homogenous term!), emotional containment, indirect communication and prioritising group needs may be valued differently. Yet students from these cultural backgrounds are taught, implicitly or explicitly, that their cultural practices represent deficits in emotional intelligence requiring correction.

The consequence is a form of “extractive capitalism with a smile”, the reinforcement of Western, male, white, middle-class norms presented as universal standards of professional emotional competence. This manifests in several ways:

Pathologising cultural difference

Students whose cultural practices around emotion, communication or leadership differ from dominant norms are labelled as lacking emotional intelligence. When a student expresses deference to authority, they may be seen as lacking assertiveness. When students from collectivist cultures prioritise group harmony over individual achievement, they may be perceived as lacking leadership capacity.

The framework provides justification for viewing non-Western emotional styles as deficient, requiring students to assimilate to dominant norms to be seen as professionally competent.

Privileging “professional” emotional norms

Dominant frameworks exhibit relentless pressure toward “hegemonic positivity”, the expectation that professionals should be optimistic, enthusiastic, solution-oriented and pleasant. Whilst all of these are excellent qualities they do not occur in isolation, they form part of a spectrum of emotions and human experience. All emotions are valid and of value. However, in dominant EI discourses negative emotions are framed as problems requiring (anger) management.

This demand for emotional conformity functions as a screening mechanism, advantaging students whose home cultures align with white, Western professional norms while disadvantaging those whose cultural practices differ. It also suppresses legitimate responses to injustice, anger at discrimination, grief about harm, fear about precarity are all “unprofessional.” The rebel yell.

Silencing the Rebel Yell

The emotional norms of business education valorise civility, optimism and composure while pathologising anger, grief and outrage. Yet these so-called “negative” emotions are precisely those required for ethical imagination and systemic change. To teach leaders to suppress anger in the face of exploitation is to teach compliance with that exploitation.

As critical educators have observed in SEL, hegemonic positivity is not harmless, it is the emotional grammar of neoliberal professionalism, ensuring that dissent is reframed as dysfunction.

Emotions like anger, which have played critically productive roles in movements for justice and transformation, are framed as unprofessional problems to overcome through self-management. Dominant frameworks privilege conflict avoidance and “emotional regulation” in ways that suppress what may be necessary disruption.

Business students learn that to be emotionally intelligent means to:

• Control your anger even when facing injustice
• Maintain positivity even in toxic environments
• Resolve conflicts “constructively” (i.e. without challenging power)
• Wait to speak out until you have “earned” sufficient organisational capital
• Frame critiques diplomatically to avoid being seen as “difficult”

This silencing is particularly acute for students from marginalised backgrounds who may be experiencing discrimination, microaggressions or structural barriers. They are taught their righteous anger is a failure of emotional intelligence that they must personally manage. But to feel deeply is to register the ethical texture of systemic harm. The task is not to suppress these emotions but to channel them toward transformation.

Missing Dimensions: The Systemic, The Collective, and The Planetary

Perhaps most fundamentally, dominant emotional intelligence frameworks fail to address three essential dimensions critical for responsible management education:

The systemic dimension

Emotions are not politically or economically neutral. They are shaped by organisational systems, power relations, material conditions and structural forces. Fear, burnout, anger and demoralisation emerge from workplace conditions: precarity, exploitation, discrimination, excessive workload, lack of autonomy.

Yet dominant frameworks treat emotions as private, internal states unconnected to structural factors. This depoliticization means that:

• Organisational toxicity is reframed as individual stress requiring personal management
• Burnout is treated as individual failure to maintain work-life balance
• Discrimination becomes individual sensitivity requiring emotional resilience
• Exploitation is obscured by language of personal responsibility and grit

The systemic sources of emotional distress remain invisible and unaddressed. This is not accidental, it reflects a “post-political agenda” that privileges individual empathy and personal development while avoiding robust analyses of power, structural inequality and material conditions.

The collective dimension

By hyper-focusing on individual competencies, dominant frameworks obscure the fundamentally relational nature of emotional life and organisational culture. We do not develop or experience emotional capacity in isolation, it emerges through relationships, is regulated mutually (not just individually) and connects us to communities, histories, stories.

Moreover, the challenges targeted in the SDGs, climate crisis, inequality, injustice, require collective action. Yet typically, dominant EI frameworks’ emphasise individual performance and demand that “change” be civil and non-disruptive which actively undermines opportunities for collective organising, solidarity and transformative action.

So, in following these frameworks business students may learn to:

• Focus on personal development rather than collective organising
• Value individual leadership over distributed power
• Frame collaboration instrumentally (teamwork for competitive advantage) rather than as practice of collective flourishing
• Avoid conflict rather than engage productively with difference and power

The planetary dimension

Business education largely lacks frameworks integrating emotional intelligence with ecological consciousness and stakeholder responsibility. Dominant approaches operate within anthropocentric (human-centred) worldviews that position business success as separate from, and often opposed to, planetary and community wellbeing.

This disconnect is catastrophic in an era of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. By promoting resilience to environmental degradation and stakeholder harm, dominant EI frameworks condition students to adapt to extractive business models rather than cultivating the consciousness and commitment needed to transform them.

Students may then learn emotional intelligence that helps them:

• Navigate organisational politics but not question whose interests organisations serve
• Manage stakeholder relations but not challenge shareholder primacy
• Be sensitive to employee wellbeing but not confront exploitative labour practices
• Communicate about sustainability but not transform extractive business models
• Feel “empathy” (in reality, sympathy) for those harmed by their business decisions but not restructure the systems causing that harm

How Dominant EI Frameworks Can Undermine PRME and the SDGs

The alignment between dominant emotional intelligence frameworks and extractive business logic directly undermines the mission of PRME and the goals of the SDGs. This is not just unfortunate, it is a fundamental contradiction that business educators can address.

PRME and Responsible Management Education

The Principles for Responsible Management Education represent a commitment to transform business education to serve sustainable development and social justice.

PRME recognises that business-as-usual has failed, that existing systems have produced the polycrisis we face. It calls for fundamental transformation: from shareholder primacy to stakeholder responsibility, from short-term extraction to long-term value creation, from growth-at-all-costs to regenerative development.

Yet dominant emotional intelligence frameworks embed the exact logic PRME seeks to transform. They often:

• Prioritise individual optimisation over systemic change
• Rely on pedagogies of compliance rather than transformation
• Avoid research on how EI perpetuates extractive systems
• Frame partnership as networking rather than solidarity
• Suppress rather than facilitate critical dialogue and constructive dissent

The SDGs as Uncertainty Management

As outlined in our Why PRME, Why Play context document, the SDGs can be understood as “the affirmative mirror image of the risks (uncertainties) driving the polycrisis”. They represent the uncertainties businesses must navigate:

• SDG 1 (No Poverty) ↔ Cost-of-living crisis
• SDG 13 (Climate Action) ↔ Climate change failure
• SDG 16 (Peace & Justice) ↔ Social fragmentation
• etc…

Responsible management education must therefore help students navigate these interconnected uncertainties. But dominant EI frameworks are designed for optimising performance within existing systems, not transforming systems to address root causes the issues facing the world today.

Consider climate crisis (SDG 13):

• Dominant EI approach: Develop resilience to navigate disruptions, manage eco-anxiety, communicate about sustainability, maintain stakeholder relations
• What is needed: Capacity to challenge business models dependent on extraction and growth, build coalitions for systemic change, channel grief and anger into action, imagine regenerative alternatives

Or inequality (SDG 10):

• Dominant EI approach: Develop empathy for diverse stakeholders, manage unconscious bias, demonstrate inclusive leadership, maintain team cohesion across difference
• What’s needed: Capacity to recognise and redistribute power, challenge exploitative practices, organise for justice, transform structures producing inequality

The frameworks are mismatched to the mission. Dominant EI prepares students to be better at navigating extractive capitalism, more skilled at managing themselves and others within broken systems. What PRME requires is capacity to transform those systems.

The Hidden Curriculum Problem

Perhaps most insidiously, teaching dominant emotional intelligence frameworks in the context of PRME perpetuates the hidden curriculum that contributed to the polycrisis in the first place.

The hidden curriculum consists of implicit assumptions and values embedded in educational experiences, what is learned through unstructured socialisation, what escapes our routinised perspectives of what happens in learning. In business schools, the hidden curriculum can include:

Assumption 1: Profit maximisation is compatible with responsibility.

The hidden curriculum suggests that with sufficient emotional intelligence, leaders can optimise both financial performance and stakeholder wellbeing, that there are no fundamental trade-offs, that win-win solutions always exist, that responsible business is simply good business.

This obscures the reality that extractive business models systematically transfer value from communities and ecosystems to shareholders, that short-term financial pressure often conflicts with long-term sustainability, that sometimes responsibility requires sacrificing profit.

Dominant EI frameworks reinforce this assumption by positioning emotional intelligence as enhancing business success. The implicit message: develop your EI and you can have it all, profit and purpose, performance and responsibility.

Assumption 2: Individual leadership capacity is the primary driver of change.

The hidden curriculum positions change as primarily about developing better individual leaders rather than transforming systems, structures and power relations. If we just train emotionally intelligent leaders, organisations and markets will naturally become more responsible.

This obscures how systems and incentives shape behaviour, how concentrated power resists change, how structural barriers limit individual agency. It places unrealistic burden on individual leaders while letting systems off the hook.

Dominant EI frameworks reinforce this by focusing development on individual competencies rather than collective organising, structural change or power redistribution.

Assumption 3: Uncertainty is something to minimise and control.

The hidden curriculum treats uncertainty as inherently negative, a problem to be managed, a risk to be mitigated, a challenge requiring resilience. Success means minimising or masking exposure to uncertainty and maintaining the façade of stability.

This assumption is pervasive across much management education and reflected in how we teach strategy, operations, finance and…emotional intelligence. Yet as this mindset is precisely what limits our capacity to address the polycrisis.

The polycrisis requires exploration, not just exploitation, embracing uncertainty as source of innovation and transformation, not just risk to be managed. Dominant EI frameworks, with their emphasis on regulation, control and stress management, reinforce the exploitation mindset when what we need is exploration.

Assumption 4: Existing business models and structures are fundamentally sound.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the hidden curriculum assumes that with some reforms and better leadership, current business systems can become responsible and sustainable. We need tweaks, not transformation; better people, not different structures; more emotional intelligence, not new economic models.

This obscures how deeply extractive logic is embedded in dominant business practices, how shareholder primacy, quarterly earnings pressure, growth imperatives and competitive dynamics systematically prioritise short-term financial returns over long-term sustainability and stakeholder wellbeing.

Dominant EI frameworks recent surge to prominence within leadership education reinforces this by treating emotional intelligence as what’s missing, if leaders just had better EI, everything would work. This implies the problem is people, not systems; individual capacity, not structural design.

The Result: Training Better Extractors

When we teach dominant emotional intelligence frameworks in business schools, even in PRME contexts, we risk producing emotionally intelligent extractive leaders. These are individuals skilled at:

• Building trust and loyalty while serving extractive business models
• Inspiring teams to work harder for unsustainable goals
• Managing stakeholders while prioritising shareholders
• Communicating care while perpetuating harm
• Maintaining their own wellbeing whilst having to navigate toxic systems
• Appearing responsible while avoiding fundamental change

These leaders are more effective than purely technical managers and that effectiveness serves extraction. They are better at getting people to accept, adapt to and even enthusiastically participate in systems that harm communities and ecosystems.

This is the core contradiction: emotional intelligence in service of extractive business logic produces sophisticated and ‘more caring’ harm, not responsibility.

An Alternative Framework

Critical and Relational Capacities for Responsible Leadership

A critical examination of existing models points towards alternatives, not another set of individual competencies but a different way of thinking about what emotional and social capacity is for in business education aligned with PRME.

Critical and Relational Capacities for Responsible Leadership (CRCRL) offers such an alternative. This framework is grounded in eight foundational principles that replace the ontology underlying dominant emotional intelligence approaches:

1. Relational Ontology Over Individualism

Leadership capacity emerges through relationships, not within isolated individuals. We are always becoming-with others, shaped by organisational systems, material conditions, cultural contexts and more-than-human ecologies. There is no autonomous leader who develops emotional intelligence in isolation from the systems they inhabit.

2. Regenerative Interdependence

Business is embedded in ecological and social systems. Human and organisational flourishing is inseparable from planetary and community wellbeing. Leadership development must integrate stakeholder consciousness and ecological awareness as core, not peripheral.

3. Critical Reflexivity and Power Analysis

Emotions are political and economic, shaped by organisational power, structural conditions and systemic forces. Learning requires examining how privilege, marginalization, discourse and material conditions shape experience and continuously reflecting on one’s positionality within systems.

4. Regenerative Process and Co-Creation

Learning is cyclical, not linear involving experimentation, failure, reflection and emergence. Knowledge is co-produced among students, educators and communities, continually revised rather than standardised. This aligns with the exploratory mindset required for navigating the polycrisis.

5. Productive Discomfort and Vulnerability

Leadership development involves surfing uncertainty, discomfort and not-knowing. Humility and vulnerability is not weakness but opening toward solidarity and transformation. Safety means relational trust sufficient to engage difficult truths, not absence of challenge. This creates conditions for addressing the sensitive topics embedded in PRME and SDGs.

6. Plural and Decolonial Epistemologies

Cultural, spiritual, Indigenous, embodied and artistic knowledges are equally valid. No single blueprint (especially WEIRD frameworks!) defines effective leadership or emotional capacity. Learning honours multiple ways of knowing, being and leading.

7. Creative and Artful Inquiry

Playful, narrative, embodied and multimodal practices make space for ambiguity, imagination and dimensions of experience that exceed measurement. Playfulness is the optimal state for engaging with uncertainty, providing “just right” levels of uncertainty that facilitate engagement, learning and innovation.

8. Justice-Oriented Transformation

The purpose of leadership development is not individual career success or organisational performance optimisation. It is collective liberation, ecological regeneration and transformation of extractive structures into systems that serve stakeholder flourishing and planetary health.

Five Core Capacities-in-Relation

Rather than individual competencies to master, these are living practices that emerge through ongoing participation in responsible, relational and regenerative organisations and systems.

Dominant EI Framework	Critical-Relational Alternative	Core Transformation
Self-Awareness: Identifying and understanding one’s emotions, values, and impact	Situated Self-Location and Critical Reflexivity: Understanding oneself as embedded in organisational systems, power relations, and ecological networks	From introspection to systemic awareness; from autonomous self to relational becoming; from personal insight to power analysis
Self-Management: Regulating emotions, managing stress, demonstrating resilience	Collective Response-ability and Transformative Agency: Responding ethically to organizational and systemic conditions while mobilising for change	From individual control to mutual care; from adaptation to transformation; from resilience to resistance (rebel yell!); from stress management to system change
Social Awareness: Understanding others’ perspectives, demonstrating empathy	Stakeholder Consciousness and Planetary Awareness: Recognition of interdependence across human stakeholders and more-than-human world	From empathy-as-understanding to solidarity-as-action; from human-centred to ecological consciousness; from awareness to accountability
Relationship Skills: Communicating effectively, managing conflict, building teams	Collective Care and Solidarity Practices: Building relationships and cultures that redistribute power and serve collective flourishing	From instrumental relationships to care practices; from conflict management to productive engagement with difference; from team building to solidarity organising
Responsible Decision-Making: Making ethical choices, considering consequences	Ethical Imagination and Regenerative Action: Creative envisioning and enacting of possibilities for justice, stakeholder wellbeing and planetary health	From individual choices to collective transformation; from consequence calculation to systems redesign; from compliance to (re)imagination

Each capacity is described in detail in an accompanying framework document, but some key features include:

Situated Self-Location and Critical Reflexivity moves beyond self-awareness as introspection to recognise that leaders are always positioned within systems of power, privilege and organisational culture. It includes critical examination of how race, class, gender, ways of thinking and being and other dimensions of identity shape access and influence; how organisational incentives and structures shape behaviour; and how business models determine whose interests are served.

Collective Response-ability and Transformative Agency replaces self-management’s focus on individual regulation with response-ability, the capacity to respond ethically to conditions while mobilising collectively for change. It legitimises productive dissent and centres transformation of extractive systems over individual adaptation to them.

Stakeholder Consciousness and Planetary Awareness extends awareness beyond human relationships and organisational stakeholders to include ecological systems, future generations and communities affected by business decisions. It recognises that organisational decisions have cascading impacts across interconnected systems.

Collective Care and Solidarity Practices transforms relationship skills from techniques for influence into practices of building cultures where power is distributed, where care flows multidirectionally, and where solidarity across difference enables collective action for transformation.

Ethical Imagination and Regenerative Action moves beyond rule-following and stakeholder management to creative ethical discernment and action toward regenerative alternatives. It asks not “how do I succeed within this system?” but “what regenerative systems should we create together?”

Implications for Business Education and PRME Implementation

Adopting this or other alternative frameworks requires more than curriculum change, it demands shifts in how we understand the purpose of business education, the role of emotional and social development and the relationship between learning and transformation.

Navigating Institutional Resistance

We recognise that introducing a new framework will often face resistance.

There are those who will see it as too political:
PRME is inherently political, it calls for transformation of business systems that contributed to the polycrisis. Teaching dominant EI frameworks is equally political; it just appears neutral because it aligns with existing power. We are making the politics explicit and aligning with PRME’s transformative mission.

There are those who will be concerned about employability:
Students need capacity to navigate the actual conditions they will face, organisations grappling with climate crisis, inequality, stakeholder pressure, omnipresent uncertainty and shifting expectations. Dominant EI prepares them for business-as-usual; this framework prepares them for transformation that is already underway. Moreover, employers increasingly seek leaders capable of systemic thinking, stakeholder engagement and navigating complex change, areas this framework looks to help develop.

From those who want greater evidence base:
Dominant frameworks are “evidence-based” only if we accept their definitions of success (individual performance, organisational productivity). Research on culturally responsive pedagogy, collective organising, systems change and regenerative business demonstrates that transformation requires different capacities than optimisation. We therefore need, within the whole filed, evidence for transformation, not just performance within extractive systems.

Preventing Co-optation:
Perhaps the greatest risk to any new framework is that it becomes the next buzzword, “critical emotional intelligence” or “regenerative leadership”, commodified, watered down and ultimately absorbed into the very systems it critiques extinguishing its capacity to drive transformation.

To guard against this we can:

Maintain explicit justice and transformation commitments:
We must try not to allow the critique of extractive systems to be softened into “stakeholder balance” or “sustainable business.” The polycrisis demands transformation, not optimisation. We must seek to keep naming power, privilege, extraction and the need for systemic change.

Resist standardisation and performative measurement:
We should try to push back against efforts to create standardised curricula, assessment rubrics or competency checklists for “critical emotional intelligence.” These capacities cannot be packaged, scored or certified. They emerge through practice in context.

Centre marginalised voices:
We must continually return to the leadership and wisdom of those most harmed by extractive business, communities facing environmental destruction, workers experiencing exploitation, peoples dispossessed by colonialism. Business education must be accountable to them, not just to current or future business leaders.

Stay in process:
We should treat this framework as living and evolving, always open to revision based on practice, context and, importantly, critique. The moment it becomes fixed, it begins to calcify into another regime of control.

Build collective power:
This work is stronger when done collectively. Connect with PRME networks, critical management studies scholars, social movement organisations and communities working for transformation. We must support each other in resisting co-optation and maintaining integrity.

Conclusion: From Extraction to Regeneration

Traditional emotional intelligence brought emotion into management discourse, an important advance. But it did so by disciplining emotion into the same systems that made emotion unsafe in the first place. What began as a humanising project has become a technology of optimisation.

The task now is not to refine emotional intelligence discourse but to reframe it altogether, as a practice of collective flourishing, planetary responsibility and ethical imagination in action.

We can do better.

Critical and Relational Capacities for Responsible Leadership repositions emotional and social development as essential for collective transformation rather than individual optimisation. It asks not “how do we help students succeed within extractive capitalism?” but “how do we develop capacity for regenerative transformation?”

Where dominant frameworks seek individual competence, this approach cultivates collective capacity. Where dominant frameworks demand emotional regulation, this approach nurtures transformative agency. Where dominant frameworks promise career success, this approach enables systemic change. Where dominant frameworks adapt students to extraction, this approach prepares them for regeneration.

Shifting mental models is challenging. It requires unlearning deeply held beliefs about emotions, leadership, success and the purpose of business education. It demands confronting how many business schools have functioned and some continue to function as training grounds for extraction rather than transformation.

Yet this work is also urgent and generative. The polycrisis is here. The uncertainties addressed through the SDGs are not hypothetical future challenges but present realities. We need business leaders equipped not to optimise existing systems but to navigate the transformation toward regenerative alternatives.

This is what responsible management education requires: not emotional intelligence in service of extraction, but relational capacity in service of regeneration; not resilience to adapt to the polycrisis, but collective agency to address its root causes; not individual success within broken systems, but solidarity to build systems worth succeeding within.

The Principles for Responsible Management Education call for transformation. Frameworks for emotional and relational development must embody that transformation.

This position paper is an invitation to PRME educators: examine the hidden curriculum in how we develop emotional intelligence, recognise the contradictions between dominant frameworks and our transformative mission and continue the work of building regenerative alternatives.

The future of business, and the planet, depends on it.

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