Listen With Your Heart: Building Job Satisfaction Through Emotional Intelligence

The changing environment of today’s organizations creates an atmosphere ripe for emotions. This ebb and flow of emotions need to be managed in order to facilitate positive outcomes such as job satisfaction. The literature provides evidence that emotional intelligence directly impacts one’s satisfaction at work. This research attempts to go beyond these higher-order findings to examine the dimensional aspects of emotional intelligence and the impact each one has on job satisfaction in U.S.-based workers. Further, the research adds to the conversation about emotions and job satisfaction by examining the leader-follower relationship and its enhancement of follower job satisfaction. The results confirmed previous findings of higher levels of emotional intelligence increasing levels of job satisfaction, whether that emotional intelligence is found in the leader or the follower. However, results could not confirm that all four emotional intelligence dimensions significantly and positively related to job satisfaction. Analysis of the leader-follower dyad indicated that the congruence between the leaders’ and followers’ emotional intelligence led to an enhancement of job satisfaction in followers, enhancing the effect both leader and follower emotional intelligence had on job satisfaction. These findings are significant in that they are among the first to elaborate on the dimensions of emotional intelligence and appear to be the first to indicate the importance of leader and follower emotional intelligence similarity in the improvement of one’s satisfaction at work