Questionable prospective effects of emotional intelligence and psychological empowerment on work engagement: A comment on Zhou and Wang (2026)

Based on prospective cross-lagged effects, Zhou and Wang concluded that emotional intelligence and psychological empowerment contribute to increased work engagement among university administrators. However, it is well known that cross-lagged effects may be spurious. Here, we reanalyzed data generated to resemble the data used by Zhou and Wang with alternative models and found discrepant increasing and decreasing effects, depending on the analyzed model, and meta-analytic poolings of these discrepant effects did not differ significantly from zero. Hence, the findings by Zhou and Wang may have been spurious and their conclusions premature. It is important for researchers to bear in mind that correlations, including cross-lagged effects, in observational (i.e., non-experimental) data may be spurious rather than due to genuine effects. We recommend researchers to fit alternative models to data and to base conclusions on a juxtaposition of the findings.