Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Success of Secondary School Principals in Rivers State, Nigeria

Abstract

This is an expost facto research designed to determine the influence of
emotional intelligence on leadership success of secondary school principals
in Rivers State of Nigeria. The population consisted 441 principals (243 in
public and 198 in private) secondary schools in Rivers State. A sample of
208 principals drawn through simple random sampling technique (balloting)
was used. Three research questions and three null hypotheses guided the
study. The instruments used for data collection were Emotional Intelligence
Scale (EIS) with a Cronbach alpha reliability co-efficient score of 0.89 by
Schutte, Malouff, Simunek, McKenley, Hollander, Bobik, Coston, Greeson,
Jedlicka, Rhodes, Wendorf, (2001) and Leadership Success Scale (LSS) adapted from the Development Dimensions International DDI (2009) and
Bryan (2005) respectively with a reliability co-efficient score of 0.83. Data
of the study were analyzed using Mean (x), Standard Deviation (SD) and ttest. Results got after data analysis indicated that principals of high
emotional intelligence demonstrated greater leadership success than their
counterpart of low emotional intelligence. While gender was found to be a
significant factor of leadership success among principals of high emotional
intelligence, age was not found to be a significant factor. It was also found
that gender and age were not significance factors of leadership success
among principals of low emotional intelligence. Based on these results,
recommendations were made including that there should be pre-service
assessment of teachers on emotional intelligence and that principals on the
job should be given emotional intelligence training to enhance leadership
success.