Indeed, managers with a low level of EI, will need to develop their ability in order to successfully adapt - and help their team adapt - to this tense environment (Côté, 2017 McNulty & Marcus, 2020 Reiman et al., 2015 Schlegel & Mortillaro, 2019). Managers with a high level of EI have proved to be more able to regulate disturbing emotions for self and others (Caruso & Salovey, 2004 Farh, Seo, & Tesluk, 2012 Haag and Getz, 2016, b Tse, Troth, Ashkanasy, & Collins, 2018) compared to those lacking such competence. This worldwide health crisis - which is as much an economic and psychological crisis - has forced managers to be even more aware of their own emotions and the emotions of their subordinates, many of whom are anxious and struggle to regulate their stress at work (Serafini et al., 2020). The intelligent use of emotions emerges as the new challenge for managers whose role is emotionally demanding (Ashkanasy et al., 2019 Ashkanasy & Daus, 2002 Caruso & Salovey, 2004 Côté, 2017 Haag and Getz, 2016, b Humphrey et al., 2016), even more today with the COVID-19 crisis (Brooks et al., 2020). For all these reasons, QEPro is a promising tool for studying the role of EI competencies in managerial outcomes.įor the past thirty years, an “affective revolution” (Barsade et al., 2003) has taken place in the workplace leading scholars around the world to study emotional intelligence (EI) in management. The tool also correlates in meaningful and theoretically congruent ways with general intelligence, Trait EI measures, the Big Five factors of personality, and the Affect measures used in this study. Our study showed that QEPro has good psychometric qualities such as high measurement precision and internal consistency, an appropriate level of difficulty and a clear factorial structure. For all items, correct and incorrect response options were developed using established theories from the emotion and management fields. In order to increase both the ecological and the face validity of the test for the target population we used the Situational Judgment Tests framework and a theory-based item development and scoring approach. QEPro is an ability EI measure specifically dedicated to managers and business executives in a French cultural environment ( N = 1035 managers and executives). By developing and validating QEPro we propose a new performance-based measure of EI based on a modified version of Mayer and Salovey’s ( 1997) four-branch model. The aim of this article is to address some of the main limitations observed in previous studies of EI. For over thirty years, many researchers have used or designed tools for measuring EI, most of which raise important psychometric, cultural and contextual issues. Managers’ interest in the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has grown steadily due to an accumulation of published articles and books touting EI’s benefits.