Impact of Emotional Intelligence on Educational Project Success: Empirical Evidence from Higher Education Institutions of Pakistan

Abstract

The Research Projects in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are complex in nature and the number has been raising perpendicularly especially with the opening of numerous new critical research areas and considerable level of difficulties. This research was conducted in view of the increasing demand of educational projects in the HEI’s of Pakistan to cope-up with the international standards. Pakistani universities while remaining behind in the international ranking and one of the elements of these rankings is research output. Educational research projects play a vital part in generating original index of the country. Government of Pakistan invest heavily in the HEI’s research projects through HEC Pakistan and other research bodies. In a field of research projects, besides technical knowledge, personality traits have more importance in the project success this study is testifying the Emotional Intelligence (EI) of Principal Investigator’s (Project Manager’s) of Research project towards project success. Secondly, this research also successfully established the linkage between Individual Innovation as moderating factor among EI and Transformational Leadership (TL) in success of project by analyzing the data collected from 209 respondents of NRPU programme of HEC including Vice Chancellors, Registrars, Deans and senior faculty from all Public / Private Universities in Pakistan. The results of regression analysis of this study supported that the impact of Emotional intelligence on project success. The results from Andrew Preacher Hayes model confirms the moderating role of transformational leadership among Emotional Intelligence and Project Success. These findings shall help particularly Higher Education commission and HEIs of Pakistan in general in developing strategies by considering the emotional and leadership traits. Further the study model also suggests that the assessment of awarding research projects to Principal investigators in enhancing Research project success.