An exploration of the effects of emotional intelligence on work-life balance, above and beyond personality components in working, graduate and undergraduate students

This study explored the relationship between emotional intelligence and work-life balance while holding the effect of personality constant. The relationships among work-life balance (as indicated by work-family and family-work conflict) Personality and emotional intelligence were measured in 100 working undergraduate and graduate students. While certain dimensions of emotional intelligence were predicted to correlate with personality, emotional intelligence was hypothesized to predict work-family and family-work conflict over and above the influence of personality traits. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to analyze whether emotional intelligence contributed incrementally in predicting work-family and family-work conflict. Results indicated that total emotional intelligence explained significant levels of the variance of both work-family conflict and family-work conflict, even in the presence of personality. However, the individual emotional intelligence dimensions, notably EI2 (managing own emotions) explained significant variances of family-work conflict only. From a practical perspective, the identification of emotional intelligence as relative to work related conflict management may have significant potential as a stress management technique.