Emotional Intelligence And Job Satisfaction Psychology Essay

Emotional intelligence and job satisfaction are two concepts of high interest in the modern work environment. They serve as a competitive edge in personal and organizational life. The education system or the teaching profession is one of those within which, the individuals could reap great advantage from the knowledge of emotional intelligence owing to recurrent human communication that exists among them. It has been found that lack of job satisfaction leads to lower productivity, higher absenteeism, poor judgment, defensive behavior, hostility, reduction in creativity, and job turnover. The study seeks to investigate the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and job satisfaction among the private school female teachers in Indore city.

Using a sample of 148 private school female teacher’s in Indore city, their EI were captured using a five point Likert scale. Correlation statistics revealed that EI with its four dimensions, self management, self awareness, and empathy & relationship management were not significantly associated with job satisfaction. The linear regression analysis result further confirmed the predictor nature of the four dimension of emotional intelligence for the job satisfaction.

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Introduction

Those who educate children well are more to be honoured than parents for these only gave life, those the art of living well. ~ Aristotle

The most important factor in achieving the goals of any organization is manpower and indisputably the success and progress of any organization depends on its human resources. The Education Organization is one of the organizations in which most of the human resources are hardworking, committed individuals and providing that working conditions are favourable, the will employ their talent and skill in service of the organization and will grease the wheels of its machinery.

Education is foundation for intellectual development, it’s an inspired mind which would rise one above everyone expectations. It is considered the greatest of all the art, for the teacher is one who creates many masterpieces. In imparting education teachers play a very vital role, apart from enjoying a respectable status in society they fulfil the basic objectives of education.

Teachers are important in their role in shaping students’ intellectual, emotional, and social development. Many teachers entered the field of education and the teaching profession because they had a passion for helping others and they valued the intrinsic rewards that they received (Iwanicki, 2001) as well as enjoyed the emotional and personal benefits of the job itself, such as personal growth and a sense of accomplishment(Latham, 1998).

According to Jones (2002), the number one reason for the passion that teachers shared was their ability to make positive differences in the lives of young people. It can be seen that women play a key role in this field and are considered as good teachers, as they are more aware of their emotions and show more empathy towards the student, educational institute or the job.

In today’s competitive scenario working women face stress in managing their professional as well as their personal duties they work for longer hours under stress, which affect their job satisfaction level and their performance as a result. Emotional intelligence play an important role in this matter by managing the person’s emotions and other employee’s emotions to keep an appropriate performance and to increase the ability to cope with physiological and psychological stress in implementing job as a result it may lead to a higher job performance and satisfaction.

Job satisfaction was defined as “peoples’ affective relation to their work role, and a function of the perceived relationship between what they wanted from the job, and what they perceived it was offering” (Syptak, Marsland, & Ulmer, 1999, p. 23). More specifically, teacher job satisfaction was “a predictor of teacher retention, a determinant of teacher commitment, and a contributor to teacher effectiveness” (Shann, 1998, p. 67). Teacher job satisfaction reduced attrition, enhanced job performance, and had a positive influence on student outcomes (Shann).

As a teacher occupies an important role in developing the society at large, Degradation in quality of education may be due to lack of emotional intelligence among teachers which may be result in lack of job satisfaction. Thus this paper highlights the relationship between Emotional Intelligence & Job Satisfaction of Private School Female Teachers.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Emotional Intelligence

Emotions are inherently neither positive nor negative but they serve as single most powerful source of human energy. Each feeling provides us with vital and potentially profitable information every minute of the day.

According to Van and Kunda (1989) emotions are “ineffable feelings of the self-referential sort”, and are comprehensively defined as “self-referential feelings an actor (employee) experiences or, at least, claims to experience in regard to the performances he or she brings off in the social world”. States of feeling refer to basic emotions (e.g. joy, love, anger) and social emotions (e.g. shame, guilt, jealousy, envy), as well as to related constructs as affect, sentiments and moods.

Emotional intelligence enables one to understand feeling in ourselves and in others. In today’s competitive scenario working women face great stress while managing their personal as well as professional duties which indirectly affect their job performance. Emotional intelligence plays an important role in managing self emotions and other people’s emotions so that performance is not affected; it also helps us to cope with physiological & psychological stress leading to increase job performance.

The idea of Emotional Intelligence first appeared in two academic journal articles (Mayor.et.al 1990). John Mayor and Peter Salovey (1990) conducted research to answer why some individuals were better at reading emotions than others. It was this study where first Emotional Intelligence was introduced.

“Emotional Intelligence was defined as the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide ones thinking and actions”-Mayor Salvoy

Goleman (1995) described that Emotional Intelligence has five major components such as self awareness, self regulation, empathy, motivation and social skills.

Simply possessing Emotional Intelligence cannot lead to higher performance unless it affects how people use their emotions at work setting. Emotional Intelligence may contribute to performance for satisfaction by enabling people to nurture positive relationship at work and motivate them to work affectively in teams. Work performance often depends on support and advice (Seibert et al 2004).

Job Satisfaction

According to Colbert and Wolff (1992), 50% of new teachers dropped out of the teaching profession during the first five years. There appeared to be several reasons for this decline in enthusiasm. Studies were conducted on teacher job satisfaction and concluded that numerous factors were responsible for the dissatisfaction that teachers received from their jobs.

The concept of job satisfaction has been defined in many ways. However, the most-used definition of job satisfaction in organizational research is that of Locke (1976), who described job satisfaction as “a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job or job experiences” (p. 1304). Building on this conceptualization, Hulin and Judge (2003) noted that job satisfaction includes multidimensional psychological responses to one’s job, and that such responses have cognitive (evaluative), affective (or emotional), and behavioral components.

Job satisfaction was defined as “peoples’ affective relation to their work role, and a function of the perceived relationship between what they wanted from the job, and what they perceived it was offering” (Syptak, Marsland, & Ulmer, 1999, p. 23). Job satisfaction as it related to teachers was “a predictor of teacher retention, a determinant of teacher commitment, and a contributor to teacher effectiveness” (Shann, 1998, p. 67). Job satisfaction was a difficult construct to measure among teachers because they were not unified in their perspectives about what made their careers satisfying (Shann).

Job satisfaction was extremely important for teachers to have because their attitudes toward the job impacted the learning environment of students. When teachers possessed high level of job satisfaction, they had a greater chance in believing that their role in the school was satisfying over time, cared more about the quality of their work, were more productive and committed to the school, and had higher retention rates (Bavendam Research Incorporated, 2000).

Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Job Satisfaction

Tett and Meyer (1993) divided the driving factors in job satisfaction into two categories: organizational, social, and cultural characteristics which are considered as external aspects and personality, affective, and emotional characteristics which are referred to as internal aspects. In other words, according to the view of organizational behavior theorists, job satisfaction of employees is not affected only by wage, benefits, co-workers and other external factors; rather, emotions, personality traits, and other internal factors of this sort have a close relationship with employees’ job satisfaction. Personality characteristics can be taken into account as determinants of adjustment of employees with organizational conditions and their job motivation. For Mayer and Salovey (2000), one of the personality characteristics of an individual is their emotional or affective intelligence.

Goleman (1996) claimed that emotional intelligence, not intelligence quotient (IQ) is the true measure of human intelligence. He argued that qualities such as understanding one’s emotions, recognizing and empathizing with other’s emotions and regulating one’s emotions are much more important than IQ. Consistent with the argument of the Goleman (1996), as a matter of fact, people’s life experience is greatly influenced by how they feel and perceive which in turn can play a major role in determining their level of satisfaction.

On the other hand, Spector (1997), in a model of job satisfaction, states that job satisfaction is affected by two factors: organizational and personal factors. Hendee (2002) expanded this model and incorporated emotional intelligence as a personal factor which, along with other personal factors such as gender, educational degree, demographic characteristics, etc., affects one’s job satisfaction. Thus, it appears that personality and personal characteristics of individuals, including their emotional intelligence, must be taken into consideration along with other factors in studying job satisfaction of the employees of any organization.

Ashkanasy and Jordan (1997), Millet mentions that emotional intelligence and job control can account for 26% of job satisfaction variance. Zeidner, Matthews and Roberts (2004) claimed that people of higher emotional intelligence succeed at communicating their goals, ideas, and intentions in more interesting and assertive manners. They suggested that emotional intelligence is related to the social skills necessary for teamwork. Together, these abilities contribute to a satisfying personal and professional life.

A study done by Fisher (2006) on mood, emotions and job satisfaction revealed that mood and emotions accounted for unique variance for overall job satisfaction. Thomas and Tram (2006) suggested that emotional intelligence of employees has a significant positive relationship with their job performance. There exists a weak negative relationship between stress management component of emotional intelligence and a weak positive relationship between adjustment and general mood components of emotional intelligence and job satisfaction; yet, these relationships are not significant. Hasankhoyi (2006) concluded that there is a significant relationship between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction. Further, there is no significant difference between men and women in motivation, self-awareness, self-control, and social skills; however, women had a higher level of emotional intelligence and empathy. Moreover, he points out that emotional intelligence skills can be used in order to increase job satisfaction in educational environments. Kafetsios and Zampetakis (2007) concluded that emotional intelligence is an important predictor of job satisfaction. Moreover, only the component of recognizing other’s emotions had a significant relationship with job satisfaction.

Hosseinian et al. (2008) studied the relationship between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction and concluded that there is no significant difference between any of Bar-One’s components of emotional intelligence and job satisfaction which was measured using the Job Description Index.

There is evidence that emotional intelligence affects job satisfaction of employees. Awareness of interpersonal emotions can help the regulation of negative feelings & emotions and thus the individual will have a better performance in their job; better performance will in turn set the foundations for job satisfaction. It seems that employees with high emotional intelligence will be more satisfied with their jobs, for they will identify the sense of despair and stress more easily and will reduce it. Meanwhile results of different research studies have shown that people with less workplace stress enjoy a higher level of job satisfaction. Further, researchers have come to the conclusion that people with higher emotional intelligence are at a favourable level of life satisfaction, while job satisfaction is a small portion of the larger concept of life satisfaction.

Objectives and Hypothesis

The objectives and hypothesis of the present study are:

To examine the association between the four dimensions of emotional intelligence and job satisfaction.

H01: There is a negative association between the four dimensions of emotional intelligence and job satisfaction.

To examine the effect of the four dimensions of emotional intelligence on job satisfaction.

H02: There is no effect of the four dimensions of emotional intelligence on job satisfaction.

Research Methodology
Research Design

This is an exploratory research study, as its major purpose was to gain a better understanding of the employee emotional intelligence and job satisfaction. Survey-based methods were used to collect detailed information regarding the characteristics of the female teachers in their respective schools

Research Population and sampling

There are total of 600 female teachers in various private schools of Indore city. In this study non-probability (convenience) sampling technique was used.

According to Krejcie and Morgan (1970) when in sample size determination and various variables are under study of investigation, it is therefore difficult to determine the sample size with precision and confidence level. Therefore they had created a table of sample population and the sample size as rule of thumb to ensure the sample size of said population would be able to generalize the study findings (as cited in Sekaran 2000, p. 295). Therefore, 148 respondents were the samples in this study. However only 112 usable questionnaires (a return rate of 75.67 percent) received for this study.

Instrumentation

There are two questionnaires used in the present study. The first questionnaire for EI is adopted from a study by Hyde et. al (2002) consisting 34 items reduced to 21 items after pilot study (50 respondent were selected for pilot study), developed the questionnaire on the basis of theory presented by Mayer & Salovey (1993), Cooper & Sawaf (1997) and the second questionnaire for job satisfaction is Overall Job Satisfaction Scale (OJS; Brayfield & Rothe, 1951) consisting 18 items initially reduced to 8 items after pilot study (Same 50 respondent were selected for pilot study). Using these questionnaire data were collected from the drawn sample and statically processed.

Reliability Testing

Reliability testing was done to test the appropriateness of questionnaire used in this study. In this study, the most frequently reliability test tool Cronbach Alpha used for testing the items of both the construct. The overall Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficient for 20 items is over .894 but less than .909, which is highly acceptable. According to Hair, Babin, Money and Samouel (2003), the reliability analysis scale can be accepted if the Cronbach Alpha coefficient is between 0.6 and 1.0. , where on the scale reliability score range .8 to < 9 is very good and reliability score .9 is excellent. The following reliability scores of the variables computed in this study and the score is presented in Table I.

Data Analysis

In this study, Pearson correlation test was used to inspect whether job satisfaction has significant relationship with dimensions of emotional intelligence, self management, self awareness, and empathy, relationship management. In this study multiple regressions were also used to find out which variable of emotional intelligence most dominantly influences the job satisfaction.

The Relationship between EI and JS

Hypothesis one examined the association and the nature of relationship between job satisfaction and the dimension of emotional intelligence, self management, self awareness, empathy and relationship management.

Analysis of the data resulted from the Pearson correlation analysis (see Table II), indicates that overall job satisfaction is negatively correlated with the component of emotional intelligence and it indicates that the association is not significant at the 0.01 level and the relationship between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction is not positive among the private school female teachers of Indore city.

The correlation analysis also reveals that the association is not significant and the strength of the association between independent and dependent variables are very low between job satisfaction and the component of emotional intelligence. The value of coefficient (r) determines the strength of the association and is very low and negative among self management, self awareness, empathy and job satisfaction (-0.119), (-0.03), (-0.09) respectively. However as compare to self management, self awareness, empathy and job satisfaction the association between relationship management and job satisfaction (-0.273) is somewhat good. Therefore hypothesis one is failed to be reject i.e. supported.

The findings of the correlation analysis imply that emotional intelligence(self management, self awareness, and empathy, relationship management) alone cannot lead to higher job satisfaction but one requires other components such as incentives, staff development programmes, communication, leadership style, organizational culture etc; for the private school female teachers in Indore city.

Test of Multicollinearity

One necessary requirement in employing multiple regression analysis is to test for the collinearity of the independent variables (Hair et. al 2003). Collinearity refers to the case of two explanatory variables that are perfectly correlated while the term multicollinearity is used to refer to collinear relations between more than two independent variables.

Multicollinearity may have devastating effects on regression statistics to the extent of interpreting them useless, even highly misleading (Pedhazur, 1997). Since multicollinearity could cause problems in interpreting regression analysis, it was prudent to test the multicollinearity of the explanatory (independent) variables to determine whether or not independent variables in this study were highly correlated to each other once added into the regression model. The variance inflationary factor (VIF) for each explanatory variable was used in this study as suggested by Bersenson et al. (2004).

When the result of variance inflationary factor (VIF) in each independent variable is equal to 0, this means that these variables are uncorrelated to each other. There will be too much correlation between the independent variables if variance inflationary factor (VIF) is greater than 5 (Hair, Andersdon, Tatham & Black, 1992). From the result of multicollinearity diagnostics test of this study (See Table III), it is suggested that independent variables in this study were not highly correlated with each other. Therefore this requirement for employing regression analysis techniques has been fulfilled. Table III shows the result of this test.

The Effect of emotional intelligence on job satisfaction (Hypothesis Two)

While correlation analysis of this study, indicates the relationship and the strength between the explanatory variables and the dependent variable in hypothesis one confirmed the positive yet significant very strong relationship among the independent and dependent variables in the model of the study.

To test the hypothesis 2 multiple regression analysis were adopted for the regression model to estimates the variance explained onto job satisfaction by components of emotional intelligence. Four components of emotional intelligence self management, self awareness, empathy and relationship management were included in the regression model to calculate the effects of variance caused on the job satisfaction by these emotional intelligence variables.

First the multiple regression analysis was employed to test the overall effect of the emotional intelligence self management, self awareness, empathy and relationship management (independent variable) on job satisfaction (dependent variable). The results are shown in table IV

The results from Table IV indicate that the multiple regression coefficients (R) of EI factors and the job satisfaction is .329 and the adjusted R square is .075. The value of F is 3.251 (P<0.05).

Therefore, from the regression analysis findings indicate that 7.5 percent of the variance (adjusted R Square) of job satisfaction has been significantly explained by the factors of emotional intelligence self management, self awareness, empathy and relationship management. Thus the results in this study support the alternative hypothesis is that factors of emotional intelligence self management, self awareness, empathy and relationship management significantly influence the job satisfaction.

However in the regression analysis beta values of each independent variable signify the contribution and influence on the job satisfaction was addressed and the results are shown in Table V.

From the result presented in table V, Self Awareness appeared as the strongest explanatory variable with standardized beta of .288. This is followed by empathy with a standardized beta of .024 and other two independent variables with negative standardized beta value of -0.377 and -0.137 respectively.

A further analysis was performed to examine that how these four variables; self management, self awareness, empathy and relationship management individually and jointly contribute to R Square value or the total explanatory power of the regression model. The result of step wise regression analysis is shown in table VI for the overall effect of the four variables.

The results of the stepwise multiple regression analysis indicates that multiple regression coefficients (R) of self management, self awareness, empathy and relationship management on Job satisfaction is 0.329 and the adjusted R square is 0.075. Therefore, the findings confirmed and suggested that the overall 7.5 percent of the variance (adjusted R square) in job satisfaction has been significantly explained by theses four factors of emotional intelligence influence the job satisfaction of private school female teachers in Indore city.

The result of stepwise multiple regression analysis (see Table VII) indicates that self awareness has the highest beta value (.209) and contributed to the variance of job satisfaction. Self management, empathy are however also significantly influences to the variance of the job satisfaction with relatively low beta value of 0.066, 0.068 respectively. Relationship management has the standardized beta value (-0.273) and contributed 6.6 percent (adjusted R square value is 0.066) to the variance of job satisfaction. The result of this hypothesis (Table VII) further imply that self awareness with the greater beta value of (.209) is one of the most stronger predictor of job satisfaction and therefore self awareness influence largely to job satisfaction of private school female teachers. Therefore the result indicates that a hypothesis 2 is also supported i.e. failed to reject.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

To conclude the overall study in a simple manner, that the study findings are important contribution to the body of knowledge in term of identification of a negative relationship between the emotional intelligence and job satisfaction in private school work setting.

Job satisfaction is certainly the hottest issues in the management research. Job satisfaction has been researched in different industrial environment and also at different level of employee’s roles and responsibilities dimensions. However the current management and organizational behavior research has turned its focused on emotional intelligence to cope of the ability of people to know their emotions and understand others emotions to cope with environmental demands and pressures. This study confirmed that EI has negative effect on job satisfaction of female teachers at private school. Further to this a private school administration and HR policies could have been developed to ensure that EI factor must be incorporated particularly in one of the most crucial process of staffing and performance appraisal and other HR Functions.

LIMITATIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY

The limitation of this study is the sample size, since the sample size is too small to generalize the overall study therefore the result findings may be understood with cautions and should therefore limit to the private school environment.

The second limitation as far as the research design is concerned, in term of questionnaire used in this study to capture the EI. Since there are few more widely used EI construct (Golman et al, 2002) developed a 139 items construct of most of the dimension of EI is also in use in the organization behavior studies in terms of EI and to measure its several dimensions. Therefore one of the issues which limit this research study findings is using only four dimensions instead of other dimension mentioned by (Golman et al, 2002) to capture most of the other dimensions of emotional intelligence.

Further research can be done on the comparative study of IQ and EQ of employees at work place and combined effect of IQ and EI on job satisfaction. This would certainly an important contribution to the body of knowledge, which would determine how these two effect job satisfaction at work place taking into again demographic factor such as marital status and sexual orientation of employees.

Furthermore, researchers can also look for the other control variables and introduce those onto their regression model such as age, year of experience or marital status to know how these factors influence on the job satisfaction when controlled the model through these variables in the presence of EI as independent variables etc.

Since this study does not revealed that how differently people at different department shows their emotions and had relationship with job satisfaction, therefore a research design may need to be enhanced in term of cross functionality or even cross racial level of employees and their perceived job satisfaction and its association to emotional intelligence.

There could be various approaches and many opportunity is available for academics as well as managerial research in the area of job satisfaction and the EI, the only requirement is however the understating the contextual variables of EI to take into account in the study that is how EI has effected by other variables such as family conflict, a divorced employees or organization internal environment etc.

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