Comparative Analysis of Trait Emotional Intelligence (Trait EI) among B-School Students in North India

Abstract

Emotional intelligence is vital for success in today’s business world. It is considered as the 21st Century skill which essentially needed among future managers and leaders for achieving success in personal and professional world. This study aims to measure and undertake a comparative analysis of Trait Emotional Intelligence (TEI) of undergraduate and graduate business students. Primary data was collected from 167 students studying in different B-schools in northern India. The Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Short Form (TEIQue-SF) of Petrides was used as the survey tool for measuring the Global EI and the four factors namely Well-being, Emotionality, Self-control and Sociability. The simple descriptive statistics and F-test were attempted to analyze the collected data. The undergraduate business students show higher level scores on all five factors representing more emotionally intelligent as compared to graduate students. However, significant differences were found only in two factors namely Global TEI (p ≤ 0.05) and Well-being (p ≤ 0.01) out of the total five factors studied. The results highlight the importance of emotional intelligence (EI) for students of B-schools. The study has implications for B-schools to nurture, develop and augment the emotional intelligence (EI) among future business managers and leaders.