| To be successful, an organization depends upon its people. The organization hires and trains employees to fulfill its mission. Recent psychological research suggests that social and emotional competencies differentiate between people who perform their jobs in a superior manner from those whose job performance is average or below. The objective of this research is to assess the social and emotional competencies of retail floor covering salespeople and to determine if a relationship exists between these competencies, as measured by the BarOn Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i™), and sales performance. Correlational analysis found that statistically significant positive relationships exist between annual income and two emotional competencies: self-regard and assertiveness. Correlational analysis also found statistically significant inverse relationships exist between income and two other measures of emotional competencies: the stress management cluster scores and impulse control. Subsequent multiple regression analyses also found that when the effects of age, gender, and experience were statistically controlled and the five EQ cluster scores were included, there was a significant inverse relationship between stress management cluster scores and income. In similar multiple regression analyses, there also was a significant inverse relationship between impulse control scale score and income. These surprising findings of inverse relationships in the regression analyses could have been related to the low response rate (20%) as well as distinctive characteristics of the population studied. The small sample size (N = 92) may have contributed to the lack of significant findings between income and the scale measures of emotional competencies. |
