Journal of Business & Economic Policy

Investigating the Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Employee Engagement in a Private Leading University in Cyprus
Soulla Antoniadou

Abstract
The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between emotional intelligence and employee engagement of the academic staff of a private leading University in Cyprus and hypotheses were tested. The research design of the research was conducted through the epistemological approach of positivist and quantitative research data were used. To fulfil the purpose of this study, the academic staff of the leading University under study were selected as the participants. The investigation was done through an analytical survey that included four demographic questions and two tools which measured the levels of emotional intelligence and the employee engagement of the participants. The tools used in the survey were the English version of Schutte Self Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT) developed by Schutte et al. (1998) and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) developed by Schaufeli and Bakker. The data collected for this study were analysed through the use of inferential and descriptive statistics in order to test the hypotheses for the possible correlation between emotional intelligence and employee engagement. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was used to test the hypotheses of this research. The key findings of this study support the hypothesis 1 of the research that (H1) there is a correlation between emotional intelligence and employee engagement of the academic staff of the University under study and rejects the null hypothesis. The findings revealed a low but positive correlation between Emotional intelligence and Employee engagement with the subscale of employee engagement namely ‘Absorption’ to be the one to seem to be affected more from this relationship and the one that revealed a medium positive correlation. Thus, the null hypothesis of this research that (Ho) there is no correlation between emotional intelligence and employee engagement of the academic staff of the University under study, was rejected.

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