Emotional Intelligence Essay

2.3 Findings and Discussion

2.3.1 Relationship between emotional intelligence and work performance

One of the key questions proposed in this study was addressing the relationship between emotional intelligence, its components and work performance of undergraduate hospitality students.
The results of the descriptive statistics examined the mean scores for four components of emotional intelligence. What was interesting in this data is that the respondents scored higher means for components of social awareness and emotional- self awareness (m=3.88 and 3.87 respectively. However, emotional self-regulation and social skills means were slightly lower (m=3.63 and m=3.51 respectively). That actually indicates that, the respondents are more likely to understand and interpret emotions of self and others, rather than be able to regulate and direct their own emotions and others’. Therefore, the students might not be able to cope with stress, which they might experience during the internship and perhaps be less successful in working with the customers due to not yet well-developed social skills. From the perspective of gender difference there was not found any significant difference in results for emotional intelligence and work performance T-test.
The information above provide the detailed picture of undergraduate hospitality students’ ability to recognize and regulate emotions, however it does not answer the key research question regarding the association between emotional intelligence and work performance. It was hypothesized that there are positive association between these two variables and in the reviewed literature was found the empirical evidence that prove the existence of such relationship. (Shahhosseini, Silong, Ismaill, Uli ...

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... due to more significant strength of relationship. This finding was not expected, since the reviewed literature emphasized that motivation is the main factor for improvement of job performance, yet the emotional intelligence became a stronger predictor of such phenomenon, perhaps due to specificity of jobs in hospitality industry. Although the majority of literature discuss the proposed relationship on the level of permanent employees, it is impossible to ignore the number of hospitality students that enter the industry in a role of the interns every year, because their performance still might affect customers’ satisfaction and the operations of the whole organization. The research results present the possible tools for interns’ performance enhancement, such as, accurate understanding of motivational needs and development of emotional intelligence as a competency.