Scholarly Critique on the Effect of Emotional Intelligence on Organizational Learning Staff

I am currently working my way through my third semester of the Information and Learning Technologies master’s program at University of Colorado, Denver.  This post is the seventh within a series of 12 scholarly critiques that I’ve been assigned to write for a course titled Research in ILT.

My academic partner Jason and I are researching how emotional intelligence relates to group learning within organizations.  With that in mind, a search on ResearchGate, using the phrase “emotional intelligence organizational learning”  brought up a study from 2012 titled Study the Effect of Emotional Intelligence on Organizational Learning Staff, Case Study: Jihad Agriculture Organization of Isfahan.  The study was conducted by Bahman Saeidipour of Payame Noor University, Peyman Akbari of Islamic Azad University, and Mohammad Amin Marati Fashi of Islamic Azad University.

This study appears to have been translated from Persian and there seem to be quite a few errors in translation.  Direct quotes from the text have not been included in this critique.

The purpose of this paper was to study the effects of emotional intelligence (henceforth “EI”) on organizational learning among employees who work for the Jihad Agriculture Organization of Isfahan.  More specifically, the researchers were looking to study the effects of self-awareness, emotional management, spontaneity, optimal communications, and direction to emotions, all on the staff’s organizational learning (Saeidipour et al., 2012, p. 2506).  The researchers hypothesize that all of the studied elements will have a positive and significant effect on the staff’s organizational learning (p. 2506) and propose the following model:

The population chosen for the study was a pool of 500 people who worked for staff of the Jihad Agriculture Organization of Isfahan, of which, 217 samples were chosen.  The data on EI was collected using Weisinger’s emotional intelligence questionnaire, which included 45 questions.  Data was collected on organizational learning through a 16 question survey created by the researchers, that was validated by a group of university professors.  The data was stored in an Excel spreadsheet and calculated using Chronbach’s alpha.

The results of the study showed a significant relationship between emotional intelligence and organizational learning thus validating the role that EI plays when an organization is experiencing any sort of change.  Employees with higher emotional intelligence are much more adept at organizational learning allowing them to excel in the face of change and development.  This study aligns with ours in that we are looking for ways that EI relates to organizational learning, although we’re focusing more on group aspects.  It was interesting to read about a real-life study done on this topic, but I feel this paper could have been written much better were it not for the poor translation.  I’m also surprised that a few sources that were cited were not listed within the references.

Header image from here.

References:

Saeidipour, B., Akbari, P., & Mohammad Amin Marati Fashi. (2012). Study the effect of emotional intelligence on organizational learning staff, case study: Jihad agriculture organization of isfahan. Management Science Letters, 2(7), 2501-2510.