The effects of emotional intelligence on counterproductive work behaviors

Article history: Received January 28, 2014 Received in revised format 5 May 2014 Accepted 4 July 2014 Available online July 5 2014 This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of emotional intelligence on counterproductive work behavior. The study uses a questionnaire for measuring the effects of emotional intelligence, which consists of four components including self-awareness, selfcontrol, self-motivation and empathy. In addition, the study uses another questionnaire to measure the effects of counterproductive work behavior. The study has accomplished among full time employees who work for Industrial Projects Management of Iran (IPMI), as a general contractor, undertakes EPC projects in field of oil, gas and petrochemical industries in Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study has determined a negative and meaningful relationship between various components of emotional intelligence and counterproductive work behavior. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Many people believe emotional intelligence (EQ) is more effective on the success of individuals as well as business organizations compared with Intelligence quotient (IQ).However, EQ may also influence negatively on work conditions.Jung and Yoon (2012) investigated the effects of emotional intelligence on counterproductive work behaviors (Kozako et al., 2013;Zhao et al., 2013) and organizational citizen behaviors among food and beverage employees in a deluxe hotel.They reported that as elements of emotional intelligence, others' emotion appraisal, use of emotion, and self-emotion appraisal substantially influenced counterproductive work behaviors, while self-emotion appraisal and use of emotion influenced organizational citizen behaviors.Besides, moderating effects were evident associated with job positions in the causal relationships among emotional intelligence, counterproductive work behaviors, and organizational citizen behaviors.Hanzaee and Mirvaisi (2013) performed a survey on the effect of emotional intelligence, organizational citizenship behaviors and job satisfaction on employees' performance in Iranian hotel industry.Saeidipour et al. (2012) reported that that emotional intelligence had a significant effect on organizational learning.Cretu and Burcas (2014) explored the relationship between emotional dissonance and a series of other certain indicators of counterproductive work behaviors specific to employees in the customer service field.They reported that emotional dissonance, self-efficacy and self-monitoring were significant predictors for employees' counterproductive behaviors at work.The study also identified a moderating impact of self-efficacy variable upon the relationship between emotional dissonance and counterproductive behaviors.

The proposed study
This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of emotional intelligence on counterproductive work behavior.The study uses a questionnaire for measuring the effects of emotional intelligence developed by Salovey and Mayer (1989), which consists of four components including self-awareness, self-control, self-motivation and empathy.In addition, the study uses another questionnaire to measure the effects of counterproductive work behavior (Fox et al., 2001).The study has accomplished among full time employees who work for Industrial Projects Management of Iran (IPMI), as a general contractor (GC), undertakes EPC projects in field of oil, gas and petrochemical industries in Iran.The sample size of the study is calculated as follows, where N is the population size, represents the yes/no categories, 2 /  z is CDF of normal distribution and finally  is the error term.Since we have and N=260, the number of sample size is calculated as n=152.Fig. 1 demonstrates the summary of personal characteristics of the participants.

Gender
Years of education

Fig. 1. Personal characteristics of the participants
As we can observe from the results of Fig. 1, 43.4% of the participants hold bachelor of sciences and more than half of the participants were male.Cronbach alphas for emotional intelligence and counterproductive work behaviors were calculated as 0.88 and 0.80, respectively.These are well above the minimum acceptable levels of 0.70 and verify the overall questionnaire.Table 1 summarizes some basic statistics associated with the implementation of structural equation modeling.

Value
As we can observe from the results of Table 1, most statistics are within acceptable limits.

The results
The implementation of structural equation modeling has been accomplished using LISREL software package.Fig. 2 demonstrates the results of our findings.2 shows details of our results.

Table 2
The summary of testing different hypotheses

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to study the effects of emotional intelligence on counterproductive work behaviors in one of Iranian contractors.The study has implemented structural equation modeling to verify different hypotheses of the survey.The results have indicated that self-motivation has the most negative impact on counterproductive work behavior (β = -0.64)followed by self-awareness (β = -0.37),self-control (β = -0.35)and empathy (β = -0.2).

Fig. 2 .
Fig. 2. The results of the implementation of structural equation modeling