Political skill and emotional cue learning via voices: a training study

The ability to discern emotional expressive cues represents an important interpersonal emotional skill at the workplace. In a training study with 123 employee–peer dyads, we examined whether political skill enhances the learning of emotional expressive cues via voices. Controlling for the effects of extraversion and self-monitoring, it was found that political skill was significantly related to the accurate recognition of emotions via voices after a training session. As predicted, other-reported political skill was found to be a stronger predictor of such learning than self-reported political skill. In addition, social astuteness and networking ability were the most predictive of emotional cue learning among the different dimensions of political skill. Implications and limitations are discussed.