Moderating Effect of Employee's Emotional Intelligence on the Relation of Emotionally Intelligent Project Manager and Employee Engagement

Abstract

Employee's engagement is one of the very important topics in business world from years. Organizations are focusing on success by engaging its employees and retaining the talent with skills and competencies necessary for growth and sustainability. A multifaceted conception about engagement is influenced by numerous factors like organizational communication and managerial styles. To keep employees engaged manager needs to have certain abilities and skills, one of the ability is that a leader should be emotionally intelligent, who can understand his own emotions and feelings as well as of his workforce. Emotional intelligence consists of adaptive emotional functioning involving inter-related competencies relating to perception, understanding, utilizing and managing emotions in the self and others. Researchers in diverse fields have studied emotional intelligence and found the construct to be associated with a variety of factors such as mental health, relationship satisfaction, and work performance. The present study intends to investigate the moderating impact of employee's emotional intelligence on the relation of managers' emotional intelligence and employee engagement. The results of this research demonstrate that through emotional intelligence a manager can control his employees and he can use them according to the requirement of organizational goals. However, sometimes there are employees who are also emotionally intelligent and they use their own emotional intelligence that enhances their work engagement and causes other positive outcomes. These employees are engaged at work not because of their managers' emotional intelligence or leadership, but due to their own high emotional intelligence. For this research questionnaire was used to collect the data that was distributed in different construction companies working in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Those questionnaires were adapted from the other research papers. The total sample size for this research paper is 274 employees and unit of measure is individual, for data collection simple convenience sampling technique was used. The study also offers suggestions for future research on the basis of certain limitations.