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590 International Journal of Management Vol. 29 No. 4 Dec 2012

Role of Gender in Emotional Intelligence: Relationship

among Emotional Intelligence, Communication

Effectiveness and Job Satisfaction

Hassan Jor

University of Technology, Malaysia

Hashim Fauzy Bin Yacco


Ishak Md Shah


Emotional intelligence is essential factor responsible for determining success in life

and psychological wellbeing seems to play an important role in shaping the interactionbetween managers and employees in their work environment. This study is undertaken

to understand the effectiveness level of managers and employees in universities of Iran,

the study focused on understanding the emotional intelligence of the managers and

employees and its link to their effectiveness level on the job.Little research to date has

examined how emotional intelligence inuence managers-employees effectiveness in

organizations settings.Data (N=120) for this study were collected through questionnaires

that participants were managers and employees in universities of Iran. Building on top of

emotional intelligence theory, this paper explores how emotional intelligence managers

and employees are inuenced by effectiveness. The validity of the questionnaire was

evaluated by Cronbach alpha is formula for measuring the amount of which was 80%

which is acceptable. The consistency of the questionnaire was announced by seven

authorities at the average at 89%. The main results of this paper and evaluation was

using SPSS. The results indicated that the female part of the universities managers and

employees are more emotionally intelligent than their male counterpoints. Further, the

researchers concluded that communication effectiveness has positive relationship with

job satisfaction.

IntroductionThe discussion related to Emotional Intelligence (EI), communication effectiveness,

and job satisfaction remains a key topic of concern among managers and employees

worldwide. Researchers of human resource have tried a lot on this topic all over the

world especially in the western countries but the developing country like Iran there was

a require to survey this part. Therefore this paper is conducted to recognize the gender

differences with related to the emotional intelligence in the universities sectors of

Iran. There are lots of factors which have direct and positive impact on the emotional

intelligence of the employees working in various sectors of the management in the

world, like EI understanding, EI conict, EI innovation, etc. Morris and Feldman (1996)

were proposed that there is a relationship between emotions and intelligence which do

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International Journal of Management Vol. 29 No. 4 Dec 2012 591

in the competitive world effort toward attain the goals for its essence. The most important

objective in this regard is to develop the employees communication because it nally

contributes to the organizational communication. Male and female are different from

one another thus they have the differences relating to manage emotions. These differences

lead us to the difference between employees awareness, conict and willingness to make

and innovate, powerful linkage have been found between the emotional intelligence and

the communication of an employee (Higgs, 2004). Kafetsios (2004) found signicant

differences in emotional intelligence and gender groups. Female participants scored

higher than males in regard to perceiving emotions and in the experiential dimension of

emotional intelligence. Another study expressed that there was no signicant difference

between male and female leaders in the social and emotional intelligence (Hopkins

& Bilimoria, 2007). Good communication is one factor that has been found to affect

job satisfaction (Scott, 2005), due to this; the researcher proposed the denition ofgood communication in the current study as communication effectiveness, which has

a relationship with job satisfaction. Emotional Intelligence transformed progressively

from a mere notion into a dominant theory in many research areas within which its

effects on human behavior were analyzed. Recently, EI received much interest in

effective communication. Results of these studies indicated that emotional intelligence

played a pivotal role in human communication. The need to establish the relationship

between EI and effective communication was recognized. This relationship was further

emphasized by many EI theorists who asserted that managers who are emotionally

intelligent communicate well with people (Goleman, 1995; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso,2004; Weisinger, 1998). This manuscript describes emotional intelligence of managers

and employees of universities have a direct role to improve communication effectiveness.

However, the empirical evidence is scant (Day, & Carroll, 2004; Zeidner, Matthews &

Roberts, 2004) and no study has examined the interaction effect of managers EI and

employees EI on communication effectiveness. As such, the goals of this study are to

examine the impact of manager and employees EI and communication effectiveness

on job satisfaction.

Literature ReviewLike most of the concepts of the social sciences emotional intelligence has also been

dened by many researchers in different words. Emotional Intelligence can be considered

as conceptualized by Salovey & Mayer (1990) the ability to monitor ones own and

others feelings and emotions to discriminate among them and to use information to

guide ones thinking and action (p. 189). To clarify this construct further, Mayer and

Salovey (1997) postulated that emotional intelligence involves the ability to perceive

accurately, appraise and express emotion, the ability to access and /or generate emotional

knowledge, and the ability to regulate emotion to promote emotional and intellectual

growth. Among other claims, Goleman (1995) theorized that emotional intelligence is

equal to, if not more important than Intelligence Quotient (IQ) as an important indicator

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work situation. He also applied his conceptual understanding to organization as a whole.

Goleman (1998) says that the richer the organization in terms of emotions, the higher

the emotional intelligence is likely to be. In order to enrich emotional intelligence there

are certain requirements that are the desire to change, self reection, the desire to know

the feelings of others, develop emotional control, desire to learn more listening skills

etc. The purpose of this study is to know that are there really some differences among

the male and female employees in terms of emotional intelligence and doing the work

assigned to the employees. That ultimately leads to the success of an organization.

As women are joining the workforce more day by day and are contributing to the

economy of the country, the considerable attention has been given to the differentiating

aspects of the male and female workers. There are many points of views given by the

researchers on this issue of gender having different positions in an organization

the search for sex differences in the behavior of leaders have produced results that ishighly equivocal (Vecchio, 2002, p. 651). One body of research holds that there are no

signicant differences in the behavior of the male and female Leaders (Day & Stogdill,

1972; Dobbinsand & Platz, 1986; Maher, 1997), and as a whole in the overall scenario

emotional intelligence of men and women (Bar-On, Brown, Kirkcaldy & Thome, 2000;

Petrides & Furnham, 2000; 2006). Job satisfaction is vital in the day to day life, which

is far past the studies and literature related to research. Job satisfaction can be dened

as an encouraging emotional condition as a result from the features and characteristics

of a work environment (Arches, 1991; Dressel, 1982).

Hypothesis

The model for this paper is composed of four key constructs (see Figure1) including

emotional intelligence, communications effectiveness, job satisfaction and gender.

Based on the existing literature-as stated earlier- there is a positive relationship between

gender, emotional intelligence, communication effectiveness, and job satisfaction. Also,

reviewing the literature showed that gender serving as independent variable can help

emotional intelligence. Therefore, we can propose that communication effectiveness plays

an important role in concern with emotional intelligence and also with job satisfaction.

In the light of above literature we can try to nd out the effects of independent variables

on the dependent variable and following hypothesizes will help us to do so:

H1: Gender will impact level of emotional intelligence that leads to better communication

effectiveness of the employees.

H2: Emotional intelligence will have signicant relationship with communication

effectiveness of the employees.

Figure 1: Conceptual Framework

Communication

Eff tiGender

Job

S ti f ti

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H3: Communication effectiveness will have signicant relationship with job satisfaction

of the employees.

MethodologySample

Sample consists of 260 managers and employees working in different universities in Iran.

Adopted questionnaire is employed to gather data from the managers and employees. Out

of 260 managers and employees (35 managers and 85 employees) 120 responded to the

questionnaire, among which 90 were male respondents and 30 were female respondents,

which comprises 76.4% and 23.6% respectively of the total responses achieved and

Simple random sampling method was used to collect the responses.

Data collection

The data collected for the current study was by means of the well dened adopted

questionnaire of emotional intelligence developed by Bar-On EQ-i (1997). The score of

Cronbachs Alpha (0.816) conrmed the reliability of the instrument. The questionnaire

was having 133 items related to emotional intelligence, rated at ve point Likert type

scale, having 1 = strongly disagree up to 5 = strongly agree and 3= neither agree nor

disagree, and the gender, age, education level, job position, and work experience of

managers and employees were added as an independent variables to carry out study.

The higher score represented higher emotional intelligence.

Procedure

The data was collected by the help of the adopted questionnaire as mentioned earlier and

few interviews were conducted to complete the incomplete and non serious responses,

few of the universities employees and managers (research moderators) were requested

to gather data from the different universities of Iran. Moreover many questionnaires

were distributed personally and collected the responses over a two months period of

time. All the data was put into and processed through SPSS. Different types of tests were

used to analyze the data. Regression analysis was used to check the relationship of the

dependent and independent. Emotional Intelligence (EI) played the role of dependent

variable whereas gender played the role of independent variables.

Results and Discussion

The results of the study show different patterns of effect of different independent variables

on the dependent variable. According to hypothesis one that states that gender has an

effect on the level of emotional intelligence that leads to communication effectiveness

of the employees and managers working in the universities of Iran, after analyzing the

data in SPSS our results show that gender has got positive relationship with the level of

emotional intelligence that leads to communication effectiveness. Mean scores of genderof managers and employees are 3.77 according to Table 2. In hypothesis two also there are

differences among emotional intelligence and communication effectiveness of employees

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independent sample t test show that there are signicant differences with respect to

the gender in the emotional intelligence of the employees working in the universities of

Iran. Moreover women have more EI level as compared to their male colleagues. The

results also show that there are no signicant differences in EI with respect to the job

position of the employees according to Table 4. The regression analysis reveals that all

Table 1. Correlations

EI Gender

EI

Pearson Correlation

N

1

120

Gender

Pearson Correlation

Sig. (2-tailed)

N

.141

.4

120

1

120

Table 2. Emotional Intelligence and Gender

Frequency Distribution Mean N Std. Deviation

Male 3.7458 90 .54871Female 3.9821 30 .33956

Total 3.7796 120 .49009

Table 3. Emotional Intelligence and Communication Effectiveness

Frequency Distribution Mean N Std. Deviation

Understanding others 3.6348 20 .46532

Effective listening 3.8967 80 .42789

Giving feedback 3.7091 20 .47897

Total 3.9499 120 .48523

Table 4. Independent sample t test

Variable Category Mean St. Dev. t value p value

EI

Male (N=90)

Female (N=30)

3.657

3.985

.0541

.0335

-0.187 0.025

EI

Manager (N=35)

Employee (N=85)

3.854

3.723

.0483

.05230.024 .0682

Table 5. Regression Model: Regression coefcient, St. Error in

parenthesis, t- values in brackets and p - values

Constant X1 R2 F Statistic

24.326 0.423 0.145 9.310

(0.210) (0.065)

[25.253] [-2.521]

0.000 0.123 0.023

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the independent variables have positive relationship with EI. The value of R square shows

that there is 14.5% variation in emotional intelligence due to the independent variables.

The value of F statistic shows the tness of the overall model according to Table 5.

Conclusions

As a whole after going through all this process of analyzing the data of the study found

that there is differences between the male and female segment of the society and with

respect to the gender of the employees of the universities employees operating in Iran

as mostly the women are more responsible by nature and generally more concerned

about the people as compared to men. Emotional intelligence by itself will not guarantee

effective communication of the organization or greater market share as the corporations

are too complex and no single intervention will cure every ill. But the way people work

together, coupled with technical expertise and the ability to form a strong network canbe improved to help teams navigate past the inevitable bottlenecks and thus speed up

the time it takes to achieve the organizational better performance and goals. In this way,

enhanced emotional intelligence may be thought of as having a catalyzing effect, it helps

to leverage intellectual capital, and that is a crucial ingredient to achieving competitive

advantage as well. There is need for high management in universities sectors to design

and include Emotional Intelligence into communicates effectively and job satisfaction

that has helped employees and managers to co-operate better and be more motivated,

thereby increasing their innovative abilities etc. Such program should also take into

account the gender of the employees and managers.

Future Research

Emotional intelligence, as an important area of Social sciences needs a lot of research

in the developing countries like Iran. As it directly inuence the employees behavior

working in any organization, the decision making power and the abilities related to handle

the contingency situations, which may arise out of blues. There is also need to carry out

research regarding intrinsic and extrinsic factors which have impact on the employee

behavior and emotional intelligence of the employees. Sector wise research may also be

carried out to see the emotional intelligence level of employees in different sectors of the

country, to make country prosper by having intellect human capital with in the country.

On the other hand, further studies with respect to impact of Emotional Intelligence on

communication effectiveness and job satisfaction by different organization variables,

are required in this eld especially in the Iran whether its manufacturing industry or

service industry.

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