The Relationships of Emotional Intelligence and Social Capital to Professional Competence: A Study on the Faculty Members of Universities

This study is mainly aiming to examine the relationship between the social capital and the emotional intelligence with the faculty members’ professional competence.

this is a descriptive-correlational research and an applied one in terms of purpose. The statistical population included the faculty members of the universities in the north-west of Iran in 2019, among which 335 samples were selected by multistage cluster sampling method. The research instrument consisted of the questionnaire of social capital (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998) and emotional Intelligence (Goleman, 1998) and a researched-made questionnaire of professional competence, the validity and the reliability of which were calculated by face validity and the Cronbach’s Alpha test (0.82), respectively. The data so collected were analyzed through statistical tests of correlation and structural equations, by the software SPSS and Amos.

the results showed that the means of the variables including professional competence, social capital and emotional intelligence were computed as average, based on the scores 1-5, as 3.49, 3.04 and 3.11, respectively. The social capital and emotional intelligence have significant and direct relationship, respectively (p < 0.01 and r=0.59) and (p < 0.01 and r=0.57), with the professional competence of the faculty members. They may predict nearly 0.53 variance of the criterion variable.

considering the results achieved, we may suggest that emotional intelligence and social capital are effective in the competence of the university professors and they are suggested to be rather noted in the policy-making of university systems.