Impact of Emotional Intelligence on Employee Performance: An Empirical Study of Selected Banks in Nellore District

Abstract

 Emotional Intelligence (EI) has become a key success factor at the workplace, especially in service oriented business like banking where employees must handle the continuous contact with customers, focus on targets and the social cognitive struggle. The paper presents an empirical look at the relationship between Emotional intelligence and Employee performance among the employees of one of the selected banks in Nellore District, Andhra Pradesh, both in the public and the private sectors. The study measures five dimensions of Emotional Intelligence, namely Self-awareness, Self-regulation, Motivation, Empathy and Social Skills using a structured questionnaire answered by a sample of 250 bank employees chosen by means of stratified random sampling, and correlates these dimensions with a unified measure of Employee Performance in terms of task performance, adaptability and goal achievement. Using SPSS, descriptive statistics, reliability analysis (Cronbachs Alpha), Pearson correlation, multiple linear regression, independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA were utilized. Findings reveal that the five dimensions of Emotional Intelligence have positive and significant positive correlation with Employee Performance, with Motivation and Social Skills being the strongest predictors. The regression analysis supports the fact that overall Emotional Intelligence accounts about 40 percent of the variance in Employee Performance. The performance levels were also significantly different in dependence on the type of bank and years of work experience. This study concludes by providing that Emotional Intelligence training should be institutionalized within Employee development programmes of banks in order to improve on the services offered, the wellbeing of employees and the performance of the organisation. Practical implications and directions for future research are also discussed.