Emotional Intelligence as a Mediator of Work-Family Role Conflict, Quality of Work Life and Happiness among IT Professionals

Mallika Dasgupta and Indrani Mukherjee

Calcutta University, Kolkata

Emotional Intelligence is considered to be a very powerful tool to an employee to manage relationships and achieve success at workplace. The study explored its relationship to some of the important psychosocial variables in order to assess what exactly makes this component so useful indeed. The study included 120 IT professionals of Kolkata employed in public as well as private Private sectors. The sampling was purposive in nature and included only those who were interested to participate. It followed a correlational design to achieve its aim. The findings indicated that Emotional intelligence promotes Happiness, especially in case of female employees, and it also relates positively to Quality of Work Life of employees. Emotional Intelligence bears a negative relationship with Work-Family Role Conflict, indicating that Emotional Intelligence tunes down the perception of Role conflict and thereby reduces the stress produced by it.

Keywords: Emotional Intelligence, Work Life, Family Conflict, Information Techonology (IT)

Emotional Intelligence has become a very controversial topic for the last few years. Innumerable claims have been made regarding the power of this construct to make someone successful or unsuccessful, especially at workplace. It is often considered to be a cure-all solution by Business Firms. These unaccountable expectations and claims attenuate the scientific value of this construct and scholars have often raised their voices against the existence of such a construct. A rather wise path to establish the utility of EI would be to relate it to some of the basic, related and much relevant variables, which are known to contribute to a large extent to make someone successful or unsuccessful at work and relationships. Some of these variables are Work-Family Role Conflict Quality of Work Life and Happiness.

In the last three decades, Work-family Role Conflict and its far reaching consequences to the individual as well as to the organization have consistently remained in the focus of attention of the researchers (Edwards & Rothbard, 2000; Carlson & Perrewe, 1999; Zedeck, 1992).Studies suggest that conflict between work and family responsibilities are associated with adverse psychological and physiological outcomes for employees and thus have a profound effect on the performance of employees and their relationships with significant others (Frone, Russel, & Cooper, 1992; Bedian, Burke & Moffet, 1988). It also predicts absenteeism (Barling, MacEwen, Kelloway & Higginbottom, 1994; Goff, Mount & Jamison, 1990), burnout, turnover (Frone et al. 1992; Bacharach, Bamberger & Conley, 1991) and decreased job, family and life satisfaction (Boles, Madupalli, Rutherford, & Wood, 2007; Kossek & Ozeki,1998). Given these findings, the justification of inclusion of this variable may be easily demonstrated. Furthermore, it is also reasonable to expect that the Workfamily Role Conflict would have a significant relationship with Emotional Intelligence, since Emotional Intelligence has been found to moderate the effect of Work-family Role Conflict on subjective Well-being (Lenaghan, Buda & Eisner, 2007).

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