An Empirical Analysis of Emotional Intelligence and Job Satisfaction in the Education Sector of Pakistan

Abstract

The study that follows aims to assess the association linking emotional intelligence and job satisfaction amongst university faculty members of federal capital of Pakistan. Literature suggests that generally skills of employees and particularly their emotions play a vital role in successful completion of their goals, ultimately providing work satisfaction to employees. Some reasons attributing to job dissatisfaction among private university teachers include, fear of unsteady employment, low salaries, increased amount of work, lack of sense of achievement/recognition, unsupportive coworkers, incompetent supervision, company policies, lesser feeling of social service/status etc. A theoretical framework has been designed with emotional intelligence and related four dimensions of Mayer and Salovey (1997) ability model as independent variables and job satisfaction as dependent variable. Research is empirically designed and existing questionnaire survey forms (WLEIS Scale and MSQ short form) for data analysis purpose were used. Using a sample size of 120 respondents, data regarding their EI and job satisfaction were gathered using a seven point and five point Likert scale, respectively. Data analysis techniques comprised of descriptive statistics (frequencies, mean, and standard deviation); Pearson’s correlation; multiple regressions and Differential statistics (ANNOVA). Empirical analysis via SPSS software revealed a positive correlation of emotional intelligence and its four dimensions on teacher job satisfaction with respect to education sector of federal capital of Pakistan. However, affect of each dimension varied from one another. Self-emotions appraisal showed no considerable correlation with job satisfaction, whereas, Other-emotions appraisal, Use of Emotions and Regulation of Emotions to some extent showed a significant relationship with job satisfaction of teachers. Keeping the findings of this study in mind, some practical recommendations have been listed which can assist participant organizations and other related industry organizations to enhance job satisfaction of their employees. These include faculty training, reassessing of HR policies, introducing intervention, facilitating organization redesign, employing counselors in organizations etc. This study has more than a few limitations like undersized sample, and constraints in research design. Further studies can be conducted in this area by altering variables and research construct. Many prior studies have been conducted in different business settings regarding Emotional Intelligence as an important predictor of job satisfaction but only a few studies accomplished in providing empirical support to this debate. Particularly, research scenario of Pakistan has not come up with many studies of statistical affirmation of this correlation, hence it is imperative to examine and establish a relationship between these two constructs in Pakistani context.