Emotional Intelligence in Primary School Teachers: The Effect of Gender, Age and Tenure

Abstract

Teachers’ emotional intelligence (EI) is a significant skill, which has attracted researchers’ attention in the last years, as it is connected with increased efficiency and professional well-being. In order to investigate primary school teachers’ emotional intelligence we conducted a study on a sample of 109 teachers. The aim was to investigate whether EI is affected by demographic variables such as age, sex and years of teaching experience. For the collection of data we used self-reference questionnaires based on the emotional intelligence questionnaire—GalaEmo Test, which has been validated for the Greek population. The results showed that EI is unaffected by age, sex and years of teaching experience. These particular results lead us to a multifactorial justification of EI and to the conclusion that other factors should be investigated. All in all, we consider it important to create educational intervention programs with the aim of developing teachers’ emotional intelligence.