UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IN A DIVERSE SOCIETY

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between emotional intelligence and job performance among the Malay, Chinese, and Indian management employees in Malaysia. The study thus extends and adapts the existing literature regarding these variables, mainly developed for Western cases, to a major and successful non-Western economy. Since this represented a pioneer study in the context of Malaysia’s main ethnic groups, data collection was conducted on Nestlé in Malaysia, one of the major multinational organizations in Malaysia. During that time 156 management employees were surveyed. The measurements used for the survey were adopted from the Trait Meta Mood Scale (TMMS) (Salovey et al., 1995) while performance ratings were taken from Nestlé in Malaysia’s internal database. The findings of this study primarily extend the literature by partially confirming relationships between emotional intelligence and job performance and highlighting the effect of race on emotional intelligence

Keywords

• emotional intelligence, performance, race, Malaysia

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