ارزیابی هوش هیجانی کارکنان سلامت An assessment of the emotional intelligence of health workers

Introduction What is today referred to as emotional intelligence (EI) owes its origin to efforts made by several writers and researchers (Gardner, 1983; Bar-On and Parker, 2000) to find a replacement for intelligent quotient and social intelligence, which fail to fully explain and characterize humans’ cognitive ability (Freshman and Rubino, 2002). When they first coined EI, Salovey and Mayer (1989) conceptualized it to embody four skills: (1) the accurate perception, appraisal and expression of people’s motions; (2) generating feelings on demand when they can facilitate an understanding of self or persons; (3) understanding emotions and the knowledge that can be derived from them; and (4) regulation and control of emotion to promote emotional and intellectual growth. Knowledge of these four skills influenced modern research on EI and constituted the foundation of the research work of Goleman (1995), who popularized the concept of EI among academics (Bowen et al., 2016). According to Freshman and Rubino (2002), the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations defined EI as “[…] social and emotional abilities that previous research has shown to be linked to successful performance in the workplace”. EI researchers have over the years shared and nurtured a common agenda, which has to do with conceptualizing EI as a predictor of several performance indicators (e.g. job performance, employee satisfaction, service quality, firm performance) and confirming its positive effect on these indicators. For example, Shahhosseini et al. (2012) are among the many researchers who conceptualized the positive linkage between EI and job performance. Many other researchers (Danquah and Wireko, 2014; Opuni et al., 2014) have also empirically confirmed the positive effect of EI on job performance, job satisfaction, service quality delivery and customer satisfaction. Though not all studies have confirmed the positive effect of EI on the said performance indicators (Farooq and ur Rehman, 2011), majority of them have. As a result, proponents of the EI concept such as Freshman and Rubino (2002) have almost coaxed the academic community into accepting the relevance of EI to service delivery and performance in the healthcare sector. Nonetheless, the foregoing academic debate on EI and its impact on healthcare delivery, and other performance indicators, is inconclusive in view of some issues identified in the literature. After drawing lessons from the systematic review of Farooq and ur Rehman (2011), the researchers realized that one of these issues is the failure of researchers to acknowledge implications of their choice of measurement scale for their research findings, given that EI has several different scales (Freshman and Rubino, 2002). A more critical issue, for which this study is carried out, is the disclosure of Farooq and ur Rehman (2011) that research on EI and its effect on some performance variables is lacking in many multicultural jurisdictions across the world. This situation is deemed a major problem in the literature owing to the culture-sensitive nature of EI (Goleman, 1995; Mayer, 2008; Danquah and Wireko, 2014).