Emotional Intelligence of Secondary School Teachers in Relation to their Personality Types

Abstract

Teacher’s emotional intelligence determines greatly the achievement of the students and maintains overall performance of the school. Emotional intelligence of teachers plays vital role in managing their own lives and dealing effectively with the feelings of students. There is a need for teachers to develop smooth relationship with students, colleagues, administrators and parents. This holistic approach will influence emotionally supportive environment in the classroom and also be reflected in characteristic ways of thinking, identifying, managing and expressing feelings. Using Convenience Sampling method, a total of 122 participants (86 female teachers and 36 male teachers) were selected from Secondary Schools in Enugu metropolis. Their age ranged between 26 – 64 years, M = 47.59; SD = 9.19. The measures used were Big Five Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992) and 16-item Emotional Intelligence scale (Wong & Law, 2002)  Correlation design was adopted while Pearson product moment correlation statistics result showed that personality type (Extraversion r = .82, P < .01, r² = .67; Agreeableness r = .38, P < .01, r² = .14; Conscientiousness r = .34, P < .01, r² = .12; Neuroticism r = -.49, P < .01, r² = .24 and Openness r = .83, P < .01, r² = .69.) correlated significantly with emotional intelligence. The findings were discussed in view of literature reviewed and recommendations were made.