The Role of Elementary Teachers’ Emotional Intelligence Competencies in improving Students’ Motivation and Student-Teacher Relationship

Emotional intelligence is an accumulation of many emotional intelligence competencies and these competencies are generally found in people with different variations. Emotionally strong teachers impact teaching learning process in schools positively. The present study was conducted to find out the effects of emotional intelligence (EI) competencies of teachers on student-teacher relationship and student’s motivation at elementary level. Twenty five competencies of teachers were explored under five major domains i.e. emotional self-awareness, motivation, self-regulation, social-skills and social-awareness. Goleman’s Emotional Competence Inventory (Boyatzis & Goleman, 2002) was used as a tool for data collection. Two questionnaires were developed by the researchers after review of related literature for measuring the student’s motivation and student-teacher relationship. For assuring the reliability of instrument, Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient was calculated, which ranged from 0.73 to 0.86. One hundred and sixty elementary school teachers (EST) and senior elementary school educators (SESE) were selected as the sample of the study from two tehsils of Sargodha district. The data of one hundred and fifty one respondents were analyzed through t-test, one way ANOVA and regression analysis. The findings discovered that teacher’s EI competencies had significant effect on students’ motivation and student-teacher relationship in elementary schools. There was no gender difference in emotional competencies of teachers. It was concluded that age had significant effect on teacher’s EI competencies as younger ones scored higher on ECI. It was recommended that training programs may be organized to enhance teachers’ emotional intelligence competencies.