Impact of Engineers’ Emotional Intelligence on their Job Performance in Construction Industry: Mediating Role of Work Engagement

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate impact of Engineers emotional intelligence (E.I) on their engagement’s antecedents such as psychological availability (P.A), psychological safety (P.S), and psychological meaningfulness (P.M). This study aim to evaluate the ultimately impact of E.I and engagement’s antecedents on Engineer’s job performance (J.P). The research was done because improper communication and behavior exist in workplace between engineers and their employers which is associated with poor working relationship that give rise to conflicts and disputes results in hindering performance of engineers working in construction firms on different areas related to their expertise. Also, these behavior issues do not come in notice while evaluating performance. In order to find out relationships between constructs, questionnaire was developed which included questions related to emotional intelligence, engagement’s antecedents, and performance. The data was taken from 130 construction professionals for testing the significance of hypotheses developed. The PLS-SEM technique was used for analysis, and it was observed that E.I has significant impact on psychological availability, psychological meaningfulness, and performance while it has insignificant impact on psychological safety. Engagement’s antecedents such as PA, PS and PM, acts as mediators in E.I and Performance relationship. The results revealed insignificant (p=0.863) mediating role of psychological safety, significant (p = 0.00) mediating role of psychological meaningfulness and insignificant (0.09) mediating role of psychological availability. It was concluded that emotional intelligence affects the performance by affecting psychological meaningfulness of engineers. Psychological availability and safety do not signify their role in relationship between E.I and J.P