A new study has found that a student team’s collective emotional intelligence is a significant predictor of its success in collaborative problem-solving. Specifically, the abilities to understand and manage emotions were linked to both better teamwork processes and a higher quality final product. The findings, which also examined the role of personality, were published in the Journal of Intelligence.
While individual intelligence and personality traits like conscientiousness are known to predict individual success, much less is understood about what drives performance when students are required to work together in teams. This form of learning, known as collaborative problem solving, is increasingly common in modern education, prompting a need to identify the skills and dispositions that help groups succeed.
The study’s authors aimed to investigate how two sets of characteristics, emotional intelligence and the Big Five personality traits, might influence the performance of high school students working in small groups.
“This study was actually part of a larger project, called PEERSolvers, in which we were looking for scientifically supported ways to enhance the quality of students’ collaborative problem solving,” said study author Ana Altaras, a full professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Belgrade.
“This naturally led us to explore the role played by emotional intelligence and personality in student collaborations. Having previously conducted two systematic reviews (Altaras et al., 2025; Jolić Marjanović et al., 2024), we knew that both emotional intelligence and the Big Five personality traits indeed act as ‘deep-level composition variables’ shaping the processes and outcomes of teamwork in higher-education and professional contexts.”
“We also knew that both variable sets contribute to the prediction of individual students’ school performance. However, we also saw an obvious research gap when it comes to exploring their joint effects on the performance of student teams in high school. Hence, we digged into this topic.”
The researchers recruited 162 tenth-grade students from twelve secondary schools. The students first completed assessments to measure their emotional intelligence and personality. Emotional intelligence was evaluated using the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, a performance-based test that measures a person’s actual ability to perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions. Personality was assessed with the Big Five Inventory, a questionnaire that measures neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Following the initial assessments, the students were organized into 54 teams of three. Each team was then tasked with solving a complex social problem over a 2.5-hour session. The problems were open-ended and required creative thinking, covering topics such as regulating adolescent media use or balancing economic development with ecological protection. The entire collaborative session for each team was video-recorded, and each team submitted a final written solution.
Trained observers analyzed the video recordings to rate the quality of each team’s collaborative processes. They assessed four distinct aspects of teamwork: the exchange of ideas and information, the emotional atmosphere and level of respect, how the team managed its tasks and time, and how it managed interpersonal relationships and conflicts. In a separate analysis, a different set of evaluators rated the quality of the team’s final written solution based on criteria like realism, creativity, and the strength of its arguments.
The researchers found that emotional intelligence was a strong predictor of team performance. Teams with higher average scores in understanding and managing emotions showed superior teamwork processes. This improvement in collaboration, in turn, was associated with producing a better final solution. The ability to understand emotions also appeared to have a direct positive effect on the quality of the written solution. This suggests that knowledge about human emotions was directly applicable to solving the complex social problems presented in the task.
“Looking at the results of our study, emotional intelligence–particularly its ‘strategic branches’ or the ability to understand and manage emotions–had a lot to do with students’ performance in collaborative problem solving,” Altaras told PsyPost. “Student teams with higher team-average emotional intelligence engaged in a more constructive exchange of ideas, had a friendlier way of communicating, and were more efficient in managing both task and relationship-related challenges throughout the problem-solving process. Ultimately, these teams also came up with better solutions to the problems at hand. In sum, students’ emotional intelligence seems to contribute substantially to the quality of their collaborative problem solving.”
The role of personality traits was more nuanced and produced some unexpected results. As expected, the personality trait of openness to experience was positively associated with the quality of the final solution. This connection is likely due to the creative and open-ended nature of the problem-solving task.
But teams with a higher average level of neuroticism, a trait associated with anxiety and stress, were actually better at managing their tasks. The researchers propose that a tendency toward distress may have prompted these teams to plan their approach more diligently. In contrast, teams with higher average extraversion were less effective at relationship management, perhaps because they were less inclined to formally address group tensions.
“Contrary to our expectations, we found only few statistically significant associations between the Big Five personality traits and the quality of students’ collaboration,” Altaras said. “Moreover, the effects that did surface as significant–a positive effect of neuroticism on task management and a negative effect of extraversion on relationship management–seem counterintuitive in terms of their direction.”
When the researchers examined emotional intelligence and personality together in a combined model, emotional intelligence emerged as the more consistent and powerful predictor of overall performance. The contribution of personality was largely limited to the link between neuroticism and task management, suggesting emotional skills were more influential in this context.
As with all research, the study does have some limitations. The sample size was relatively small due to the intensive nature of analyzing hours of video footage. The teams were also composed of students of the same gender, which might not fully represent the dynamics of mixed-gender groups common in schools. Additionally, the study did not measure the students’ general academic intelligence, which could also be a factor in their performance.
“In our defense, emotional intelligence has already been shown to have incremental predictive value in so many instances–including the prediction of students’ individual school performance–that we would not expect it to lose much of its predictive weight when analyzed concurrently with academic abilities,” Altaras noted. “Still, the picture would be more complete had we been able to also test participants’ academic intelligence and include this variable as another potential predictor of their performance in collaborative problem solving.”
For future research, the authors suggest exploring these dynamics in larger and more diverse student groups. It would also be informative to see if these findings hold when teams are faced with different kinds of problems, such as those that are less social and more technical in nature. Examining these factors could provide a more complete picture of the interplay between ability, personality, and group success in educational settings.
“Within the PEERSolvers project, we have already developed a training (PDF) that targets, among other things, students’ emotional intelligence abilities and knowledge of personality differences, hoping to enhance the quality of their collaborative problem solving in this manner,” Altaras said. “In an experimental study, the training was shown to make a difference–i.e., to have a positive effect on students’ performance in collaborative problem solving (Krstić et al., 2025)–and we are now looking forward to having it more widely implemented in schools. When it comes to further research, we will certainly continue to explore the role of emotional intelligence abilities in the educational context, considering the performance and well-being of both students and teachers.”
The study, “Emotional Intelligence and the Big Five as Predictors of Students’ Performance in Collaborative Problem Solving,” was authored by Ana Altaras, Zorana Jolić Marjanović, Kristina Mojović Zdravković, Ksenija Krstić, and Tijana Nikitović.
