Emotional Intelligence of Malaysian Academia towards Work Performance

This paper describes the research conducted in relating to emotional intelligence of university staff to work attitude. The Emotional Intelligence (EI) Scale devised by Schutte et al. (1998) is used in this study, which is more suitable compared to BarOn Emotional Quotient Inventory. Beside their experiences, knowledge and skills, emotion play an important role in pushing individual to produce and perform the best. Emotion is critical in motivating, persuading, communicating, leading and controlling individuals and groups. The role of EI in employees’ work attitude has not been explored in-depth especially in higher institutions which rather focus EI on students and their academic performances. Quantitative method is adopted and questionnaires are distributed among academics and middle-management employees using simple random sampling. The questionnaire has been designed to assess how effectively individual deal with emotion. The findings of this empirical study would highlight the importance of EI in university and give details on EI factors that influence the work attitude among employees. The t-test, correlations and multiple regressions were used to analyze the data. The findings found that EI is positively related to work-attitude. Appraisal and expression of emotion are moderately correlated to job performance and job satisfaction.


Introduction
Most of literature review viewed emotional intelligence as a factor which has a potential to contribute to more positive attitude, behaviors and outcomes. Schutte et al (1998) cited "evidence exists that emotional intelligence can be conceptualized as either ability (Ciarochi et al, 2000;Mayer et al., 1999) or a personality trait (Schutte et al., 1998). Emotional intelligence is the ability to use emotions adaptively Mayer, 1990 andMayer et al., 2000).  viewed emotional intelligence as a non-cognitive intelligence which is defined as an array of emotional, personal and social abilities and skills that influence an individual's ability to cope effectively with environmental demands and pressures. The success of practical workplace application involving the emotional intelligence and the results of empirical research investigating the relationship between emotional intelligence and crucial work-related factors suggest that emotional intelligence of employees is an important aspect of organization (Goleman, 1995;Carmeli, 2003). Goleman (2001) found that emotional intelligence is positively related to job performance. A study conducted by George (2000) showed that aspects of emotional intelligence contribute to effective leadership. Job satisfaction is considered as a proxy for employee's well-being at work (Grandey as in Carmeli, 2003). Smith et al. (1969) suggested that job satisfaction is positively related to construct of emotional intelligence. Emotion regulation had unique predictive power for affect and job satisfaction for the younger age group (Kafetsios & Loumakou, 2007) when survey was conducted on 475 educators in Greek. Carmeli et al (2003) and Schutte et al (1998) found a positive relationship between emotional intelligence and work attitude. Research suggests that people with high level of EI lead more effectively (Caruso et al. 2002;Barling et al. 2000;andRosete &Ciarrochi, 2005 as in Dimitriades, 2007); are efficient job performers (Abraham, 2000;Carmeli, 2003); engage in organizational citizenship behaviors (Carmeli, 2003); feel satisfied with their job (Carmeli, 2003) and committed both to their career and to their employing organization (Carmeli, 2003). In short, EI is strongly linked to work-attitude especially job performance and job satisfaction. This paper describes the research undertaken with a sample of Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) staff, comprising academics and non-academics. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence and work attitudes in the university setting. The university's environment today is very challenging and demanding due to changes of policies and the increasing standard and expectation of education in Malaysia. On top of that, the staffs especially lecturers, not only need to focus on teaching but also to embark on research and consultancy as well. Due to these pressures, it is important to explore their managerial skills -particularly the emotional intelligence of these staff in order to identify their capabilities as they are the main resource of the university in producing better and highly qualified graduates. Most of EI surveys were conducted among students and managers in private firms. Survey on university staff especially academics is rare. In all universities, human capital is an important intangible asset.

Questionnaire survey
The emotional intelligence (EI) scale devised by Schutte et al (1998) was administered to university staff -academic and non-academic. The scale consisted 33-items used a 5-point Likert scale to measure EI on three main categories. 5 items of job performance adopted from Pearce and Porter (1986) and 5 items of job satisfaction adopted from Tsui et al (1992) are used to measure employee's work attitude (Carmeli, 2003) using 5-point Likert scale. All items were ranged from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. After scale purification, 23 of the initial 33 responses were summed and averaged to obtain overall EI score. Appendix I show the questions asked in the questionnaire survey. Goleman (2001) found that emotional intelligence is positively related to job performance. A study conducted by George (2000) showed that aspects of emotional intelligence contribute to effective leadership. Job satisfaction is considered as a proxy for employee's well-being at work (Grandey as in Carmeli, 2003). Smith et al., (1969) suggests that job satisfaction is positively related to construct of emotional intelligence. Emotion regulation had unique predictive power for affect and job satisfaction for the younger age group (Kafetsios and Loumakou, 2007) when survey was conducted on 475 educators in Greek. Carmeli et al (2003) and Schutte et al (1998) found a positive relationship between emotional intelligence and work attitude. H1: Emotional intelligence is positively related to work attitude: Emotional intelligence and demographic (gender, age, tenure of experience). With both males and females generally have equivalent abilities to develop their emotional intelligence (Fatt, 2002as in Dimitriades, 2007, men and women as groups tend to have a shared gender-specific profile of strong and weak points (BarOn, 1997). Specifically women are more aware of their emotions, show more empathy and are more adept interpersonally (Fatt, 2000as in Dimitriades, 2007 whereas men are more self-confident and optimistic and can handle stress more effectively.

Development of hypothesis for emotional intelligence and work attitude
H2a: Female gender is estimated to be positively correlated with emotional intelligence and work attitude.
Employees who have been with their employing organizations for a long time are more likely to develop a rich understanding of customers' varying expectations and needs (Carmile et al, 2003).
H2b: A positive relationship is hypothesized between duration of service and EI and Work Attitude.
The age of participants is strongly related to higher Emotional Intelligence and work performance (Higgs, 2004).
H2c: Emotional intelligence and Work Attitude are positively associated with age This study was conducted in Universiti Teknologi MARA Johor. 200 questionnaires were distributed but only 127 (60%) questionnaires were returned. The summary of the respondents is described in the Table 1 below: <<Table 1. Summary of respondents surveyed in the study>> Table 2 showed the descriptive analysis of the respondent sampled during the survey.

<<Table 2. Descriptive Statistics of All Principal Constructs (N = 127)>>
The mean scores of all variables are high. There is no low level of mean scores. The high mean scores implicate that respondents agree that all variables influence the work attitude. Among the independent variables, utilization of emotion and appraisal of emotion have more influence towards work attitude. Even though the rest of knowledge management activities are moderately high, their mean scores of more than 5.00 imply that these variables are important because they may influence work attitude and organizational effectiveness to certain degree.
Finally, the standard deviations for all variables seem to fall between the ranges of 0.667 to 1.079 which simply reflect the existence of considerably acceptable variability (0.648) within the data set. The variation value indicates that all answers on the study variables were substantially different from one respondent to another, thus signified the existence of tolerable variances in responses.
For the 33-item scales the reliability is 0.826. Previous studies reported 0.84 (Austin et al., 2004), 0.89 and 0.90 (Schutte et al., 1998) and 0.93 (Dimitriades, 2007). The reliability test of each category is shown in Table 3. <<Table 3. Reliability test>> Briggs and Cheek (1986) recommend that optimal range for inter-item correlation of 0.2 to 0.4. Overall alpha values are more than 0.7 which is considered reliable with the sample (Pallant, 2001). In Schutte et al (1998), model EI is suggested as a "homogenous construct" based on two arguments; first, there are alternative operationalization of emotional intelligences to the ones provided by Salovey and Mayer (1999) model and secondly, the model was represented by a limited set of self-report items. Alternative items or an assessment technique other than self-report might show more specific factors. Therefore exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was undertaken to examine the dimensionality of EI with present sample. Principal Axis Factoring with oblique rotation was performed, in line with recent methodological arguments (Dimitriades, 2007). Frequently used measures to assess the appropriateness of factor analysis are the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy and Bartlett's test of sphericity which provides the statistical probability that the correlation matrix has significant correlations. KMI was .719 and Bartlett's was significant at p<0.001 (approx. Chi-Square = 1548.974, df = 630) indicating that the sample was suitable for factor analysis procedures. Due to the exploratory nature of the analysis, the latent root criterion (eigenvalue-greater-than-one rule) was employed for extraction of factors where only variables loading 0.5 or above were used for factor interpretation (Hair et al., 1998). The results are shown in Table 4. <<Table 4. Factor analysis>> Communalities below 0.50 are considered "too low for having sufficient explanation" (Hair et al, 1998). Therefore, 10 items were removed from subsequent analysis. As guideline, an alpha value of 0.70 and above is considered to be the criterion for demonstrating internal consistency (Nunnaly, 1988). Cronbach's alpha in this study was 0.747. After eliminating items which did not meet the selection criteria, only 26 items remained which were subjected to another factor analysis. The items loaded on three meaningful factors -factor 1: Utilization of emotions, factor 2: Regulating of emotion, factor 3: Expression of emotion. H1 correlation analysis was tested and found that emotional intelligence is moderately positively correlated with Work Attitude at 0.396 (p< 0.01). The overall model explained 48% of variance in dependent variable and this is a significant contribution of p< 0.00, F = 12.375. Therefore, H1 is supported.
The regulation of emotion does not have any inter-correlation with utilization of emotion and expression of emotion. But regulation of emotion is correlated negatively with job performance and job satisfaction as shown in Table 5. Gender is entered in ANOVA model and marginal means is presented in the Table 6 and 7. Male scored higher than female on both EI (F = 0.216, p>0.00) and work attitude (F = 0.057, p>0.00). However, there is no significant difference between male and female.

<<Table 5. Correlation Analysis of EI and Work Attitude (N = 127)>> <<Table 6. Correlation of EI elements and Work-Attitude elements>> <<Table 7a. Descriptive test of EI, Work Attitude and Gender>>
To test demographic influence on Emotional Intelligence and Work Attitude, an independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare Emotional Intelligence scores for males and females as shown in Table 7b.

<<Table 7b. ANOVA>>
An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare Work Attitude scores for males and females (Table 8). There was no significant differences in scored for males (M= 3.95, SD= 0.562) and females (M= 3.90, SD= 0.444); t = 0.083, p = 0.239. The correlation between Emotional Intelligence and Work attitude is higher for males = 0.513 compared to females = 0.392 (Table 9) <<Table 8. EI and Work Attitude towards Gender>>

<<Table 9: EI, Work Attitude and Duration of Work>>
We found no statistically significant gender differences in EI and Work Attitude but male scored higher on both EI and Work attitude. From this test, it showed that men had higher correlation value of 0.513 compared to women at 0.392 (Table 10).

<<Table 10: EI, Work Attitude and Age>>
Age and length of service are not correlated to EI as well as job performance and job satisfaction (Work Attitude) which is contrasted to the study conducted by Kafetsios and Loumakou (2007) and Higgs (2004). Therefore, all H2 are not supported.
Culture could be another reason of low response rate as people are not comfortable to discuss their emotions openly. This is especially among the non-academics. This study is only conducted in Johor branch. As majority of respondents' length of service was less than 3 years, this did not indicate a comprehensive view of the real emotional intelligence among staff. For future research, the study should be conducted for the whole organization to get a better finding.

Conclusion
The purpose of this study was to examine the emotional intelligence -component of managerial skills-towards work attitudes in the university setting. Overall, EI was found to be positively related to work-attitude. Appraisal and expression of emotion is moderately high correlated to job performance and job satisfaction. This indicated that the staffs of UiTM Johor are good in leading and managing people whereby utilizing emotions is important for creative thinker, better planner and highly motivated people. This could be due to the fact that the majority of the respondents are serving less than 3 years and age range from 25-40, a period which they are constantly striving for improvement in their career path. However, the regulation of emotion is negatively correlated to job performance and job satisfaction indicated that when people experiencing a negative affective states, they would feel unhappy therefore unable to produce better performance.
The findings showed that age, length of service, position and experience did not have any impact on emotional intelligence. There isn't any difference between males and females when dealing with work attitude as proven by Langhorn (2004) when he conducted EI survey among general managers. However, when tested EI and Work Attitude together, males showed a higher EI and Work Attitude compared to female. Interestingly, males are better in capitalizing their EI for better work attitude compared to female which the former form the majority of workforce in the organization.
The study implies that organization should provide an adequate conducive environment and training of EI for lecturers. Those with lower EI would affect their work attitude. Females are the majority work force in the university but their EI is lower compared to males. Regulation of one's own emotion and moods can results in positive and negative affective states. These findings showed that staffs are lacking of regulation of emotion when dealing with others and unable to manage their emotion. The aim of this study was to examine the level of emotional intelligence among lecturers and management staff. Emphasizing more training in Emotional Intelligence would help staffs to be more open in expressing their emotions thus will help them to manage their emotions to enhance their performance. The academics are interacting directly with students; therefore being able to positively manage their emotions effectively might result in either positive or negative affective results.      -tailed) .000 N 89 89 20 I don't find that being in a positive mood helps me to come up with new ideas 21 I find it hard to control my emotion 22 I easily recognize my emotions when I experience them 23 I motivate myself by imagining a good outcome on the tasks I take on 24 I compliment others when they have done something well 25 I am aware of the "body-language" messages other people sent. 26 When others tell me about an important event in their lives, I almost feel as though I have I I I have experienced myself 27 When I feel happy, I tend to come up with new ideas. 28 When I am faced with a challenge, I give up because I believe I will fail 29 I know what others are feeling by looking at them 30 I help others feel better when they are down 31 I use good mood to helps myself to keep trying in the face of obstacles 32 I can tell how others feel by the tone of their voices 33 It is easy for me to understand why people feel the way they do 34 I find it hard to stay positive when I get stressed or worried 35 I trust my feeling when I make important decisions