The Influence of Emotional Intelligence on Professors’ Performance in The New Normal

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of emotional intelligence (EI) on professors' performance according to their gender, age, and field. The study sampled 35 professors specialized in humanities-related fields such as Economics, Law, and Information Technology ‘IT,’ and 15 professors specialized in scientific fields like medicine and pharmaceutical studies. All 50 professors were given a questionnaire consisting of 5 items within 20 sub-items designed to investigate professors’ performances based on their EI levels. The findings indicate that EI highly influences professors’ performance, which means that the optimism item has the highest influence on performance. At the same time, the other items, such as employment of emotions, regulation, and assessment of own emotions, got less in their results on performance. Moreover, age does not affect EI performances since there were different ages of professors with various backgrounds. While gender and field do, females are better at expressing their emotions due to their nature of the emotional side. In addition, the field of the humanities is better in (EI) than the science faculties. The study recommends applying the questionnaire to different populations to increase the chance of generalization.