Emotional Intelligence and Occupational Stress of College Teachers

Emotional intelligence determines an individual's success at workplace and it has been realised that it is more important than even the IQ. Occupational stress is increasing among teachers on accounts of increasing workload, poor quality of students seeking admission to colleges, inadequacy of resources, involvement in non-academic activities, and poor interpersonal relations with superiors, subordinates, colleagues and students. The present study was undertaken to find out the relationship between emotional intelligence and occupational stress and compare the occupational stress levels of college teachers with varied levels of emotional intelligence (high, average and low). 218 college teachers were randomly selected from the colleges of Chandigarh. Emotional intelligence was found to be significantly negatively co-related with five dimensions of occupational stress and with total scores on occupational stress (r = .19) indicating that higher the emotional intelligence, lower is the occupational stress and vice versa. Significant differences existed among the college teachers with varied levels of emotional intelligence on seven dimensions of occupational stress namely role ambiguity, role conflict, responsibility for others, under participation, powerlessness, intrinsic impoverishment, low status and on total scores of occupational stress. In most of the cases, college teachers with higher level of emotional intelligence showed lower level of occupational stress.