Moderating Effects Of Trait Emotional Intelligence And The Protective Effect Of Study

Emotions in organizations have been the focus widely concerned by academic and practical researchers in recent years,among which the research on emotional intelligence(EI) in occupational settings is the most attractive topic.Trait emotional intelligence(TEI,or emotional self-efficiency) is the latest research finding in the EI field.Meanwhile,research to date has found trait EI associated with lower levels of stress in occupational settings,and trait EI could be viewed as a kind of individual difference to deal with stress effectively.Hereby,based on the Conservation Of Resources(COR) model,this paper explored and verified the moderating and protective effect of trait EI being an important resource of personal characteristic by re-examining the process of the emotional work in the workplace.The samples of present study were the fast-line employees in the service industry.Adopting survey method,we firstly explored the relationship among work environmental variables,trait emotional intelligence,emotional work and personal consequence variables.Hierarchical regression was used to analysis data,and the results proved(1)the moderating effect of trait emotional intelligence on the relationship between work environment(difficult customer frequency,service climate) and emotional work(surface acting,deep acting,consonant acting),as well as(2)its moderating effect on the relationship between emotional work and personal consequence variables (emotional exhaustion,physical complaints).Major findings were the following:(1) Difficult customer frequency had a positive correlation with surface acting,but had negative or no correlations with deep acting and consonant acting.(2) Service climate had a positive correlation with deep acting and consonant acting,but had no correlations with surface acting.(3) Surface acting positively correlated with emotional exhaustion,while deep acting and consonant acting had negative or no correlations with emotional exhaustion.(4) Surface acting positively correlated with physical complaints,while deep acting and consonant acting negatively correlated with physical complaints.(5) Trait emotional intelligence moderated the relationship between difficult customer frequency and emotional work.(6) Trait emotional intelligence moderated the relationship between emotional work and emotional exhaustion.(7) Trait emotional intelligence moderated the relationship between emotional work and physical complaints.Secondly,after controlling the influence of work environmental variables,we adopted path analysis of Structural Equation Model to analysis data and explored the protective effect of trait emotional intelligence.Specifically,we verified(1)the predictive power of trait emotional intelligence on emotional work(choice of regulation strategies),and(2) the protective effect of trait emotional intelligence on personal consequence variables(emotional exhaustion,physical complaints).Major findings were the following:(8) Trait emotional intelligence had a negative correlation with surface acting,but positively correlated with deep acting and consonant acting.(9) Trait emotional intelligence had effect on emotional exhaustion and physical complaints with the surface acting as its mediator.(10) Trait emotional intelligence had effect on emotional exhaustion and physical complaints with the deep acting as its mediator.The results of this paper not only directly supported the theory of trait emotional intelligence,but the exploration of the moderating and protective effect of trait emotional intelligence also had great illumination to the further researches in the field.And that these findings might have positive referential significance to the practice of organizational management.There were two new perspectives in this dissertation.Firstly,the notion that trait emotional intelligence could be viewed as a kind of inner resouces to deal with stress effectively would contribute to future relative researches as a brand-new sight and theoretical support.Secondly,the exploration of the moderating and protective effect of trait emotional intelligence changed the situation that emotional intelligence is limited to the researches of its predictive validity.Moreover,attentions should be called that this research is not without limitations.Future research may improve it by collecting data from different ways,using lab and longituginal study,constructing more complex models,or enhancing the representative of sample.