The relationship between leaders' emotional intelligence and employee job satisfaction within a power utility

Abstract

The ever-changing work environment within the 21st century is creating many challenges that threaten organisational success. These challenges have led to increased difficulty in sustaining employee job satisfaction (Boroumand & Abaadi, 2013; Mallikarjuna, 2012; Munir & Rahman, 2016). Organisations require effective leadership to address these challenges (Ahmad & Ibrahim, 2015; Anderson et al., 2017; Eberhardt & Majkovic, 2016). Emotional intelligence has been identified as an imperative skill that enables effective leadership (Gale, 2017; Goleman, 2016; Ngang et al., 2015). Therefore, the literature reviewed implies that emotional intelligence enables effective leadership and that effective leadership enables employee job satisfaction. Organisations need to be more innovative to address new ways of ensuring employee job satisfaction, enabling positive organisational outcomes. This study aims to do just that, proposing that the development of leaders’ emotional intelligence could result in higher employee job satisfaction. The study set out on determining the relationship between leaders’ emotional intelligence and employees’ job satisfaction within a power utility. A total of 117 validated questionnaires were retrieved from the empirical research design. The Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ, short-form) was used to measure the employees’ job satisfaction levels. The Rahim Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQI) was used to measure the respective leaders’ emotional intelligence. The correlation between these measures was determined. The results from the Rahim EQI indicated an overall low to average leader-emotional intelligence score. The results from the MSQ indicated an overall low employee-job satisfaction score. The Pearson correlation coefficient indicated a distinct linear relationship between the constructs measured. Therefore, the study successfully proved that there is indeed a relationship between a leader’s emotional intelligence and their employee’s job satisfaction.