An Analytical Study of Social Intelligence and Job Performance of Teacher Educators

The main purpose of this study is to develop a social intelligence scale for Myanmar teacher educators. Then, to investigate the impact of teacher educators’ social intelligence on their job performance was next of interest. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were used in this study. A total of 1102 teacher educators from three education universities and nine education colleges participated as a sample and cluster sampling technique was used in this study. An appropriate social intelligence scale for Myanmar teacher educators was developed by applying two parameter logistic model of item response theory (IRT). The results showed that the accuracies of ability estimates of the scale are sufficient on the ability scale of between -1 and + 3. According to the discrimination indices, the items are fairly good items to provide appropriate discrimination for the whole test. Considering their difficulty indices, it is concluded that the test is fairly difficult. The results showed that among the four dimensions of social intelligence, social awareness stood the highest whereas social skill was found to be the weakest. According to the result of independent sample t-test, there were no significant differences in social intelligence by gender and marital status. But, concerning their professional specialization, teacher educators in pedagogic majoring had higher social intelligence than those in non-pedagogic majoring. The results of ANOVA revealed that younger teacher educators were higher socially intelligent than older teacher educators. Furthermore, out of the four dimensions of job performance, responsibility dimension was found to be the highest. According to the independent sample t-test, gender was one of the related factors of teacher educators’ job performance as female teacher educators performed much better than male teacher educators whereas there was no significant difference in social intelligence by marital status, age and professional specialization. The result of the correlation showed that teacher educators’ social intelligence was positively related to their job performance. Moreover, teacher educators’ social intelligence is a significant predictor of their job performance and it explains 8.7% of the variance of job performance. Furthermore, social awareness and social skill had direct predictive contribution to teacher educators’ overall job performance. A qualitative follow up study was conducted by using multi-dimensional technique. According to the qualitative results, it was found that hobby, teaching skill, commitment, classroom management and interpersonal relationship with others were related factors for improving the job performance of teacher educators