The Influence of Demographic Profiles on Emotional Intelligence: A Study on Polytechnic Lecturers in Malaysia

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is defined as an ability to identify, understand, experience and express human emotions in a healthy productive way. The benefits of demonstrating high frequency of emotional intelligence in the workplace is vast especially in service based professions like teaching. Therefore this study aimed to explore the level of EI among lectures from a polytechnic in Malaysia and in the same time explore the influence of demographic profiles towards those levels. Demographic profiles such as gender, age group, occupational grade, working experience in the current job and prior working experience in the industry are selected. The Genos Emotional Intelligence Inventory (Concise version) was distributed to all the academic departments and the total number of respondents were n=162. Findings show that the overall level of EI is average. The findings proved that the levels of emotional intelligence among the lecturers improved with age, teaching experience, grade and education where else gender and prior working were not contributing factors 2012 IOJES. All rights reserved