Emotional Intelligence as a Predictor of Satisfaction in Early Childhood and Primary School Teachers

Abstract

The increasing educational demands of the new millennium have generated an increment of works focused on explore the teachers satisfaction with their professional practice. This work aims, firstly, to describe the perception of a sample of in-service teachers in the Autonomous Community of Madrid (CAM) about their job satisfaction and subjective happiness; and secondly, to examine the existence of any relationships between these constructs and their emotional skills, to go pass later to highlight the potential predicting role played by the Perceived Emotional Intelligence (PEI) on work satisfaction and general psychological well-being in the studied collective. To this end, three different self-administered questionnaires were applied. The data were analyzed in a descriptive, correlational, and linear regression ways. Our teachers had a medium degree of job satisfaction and enjoy of a remarkable high level of subjective happiness. The significant correlations found between the 3 measured variables led to regression equations that did grant a modest predictive role to PEI on both work well-being and personal welfare. In this way, its increase could represent an opportunity to improve both the quality of teaching performance, and the well-being of CAM teachers with lower emotional competence, or with reduced degrees of satisfaction.