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Emotional Intelligence And Its Effect On The Job Satisfaction Of Employees Essay

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Emotional intelligence relates to an individual’s ability to manage their emotions, and is shown to have positive outcomes for an organisation. Manager emotional intelligence is thought to have an effect on the job satisfaction of employees, which could be due to behaviour or leadership styles. It is inconclusive which of these reasons, if any, are the cause of the positive correlation due to the lack of overwhelming support for any one cause and the biases of the studies.

Emotional intelligence was referred to by Mayer and Salovey (1997) as a set of abilities to do with understanding, perceiving, appraising, expressing, and regulating emotion (as cited in Das & Ali, 2014). An emotionally intelligent manager can understand and react to employee’s emotions as well as use their own to encourage productive behaviour. Goleman (1998) suggests there are four components to emotional intelligence of “self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill” (as cited in Malos, 2011, p. 210), while Petrides and Furnham (2001) divided emotional intelligence into sociability, emotionality, self-control, wellbeing, and general emotional intelligence (as cited in Webb, 2014). There is an agreement that emotional intelligence is about managing emotions but no definite decision on what it involves.

A positive correlation between manager emotional intelligence and employee job satisfaction has been observed (San Lam & O’Higgins, 2012; Sy, Tram, & O’Hara, 2006), however,
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