Impact of Employees’ Emotional Intelligence on Job Performance: With Special Reference to Banking Staff Members in the Colombo District, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Financial deregulation and rapid technological advancement have led the global and the Sri Lankan banking industry to a highly competitive and complex environment. Human resource management (HRM) is crucial in the service industry as the service level largely depends on human resources. Banking institutions seek to improve their human capital in achieving and sustaining competitive advantage. Employee’s Emotional Intelligence (EI) plays a major role in employee job performance. The researchers have selected a sample of 342 executive level bank employees in commercial banks in the Colombo district using simple random sampling. Participants’ responses were analyzed and interpreted by descriptive, and regression analysis. The findings indicated that EI significantly positively impacted bank employees' job performance. Emotional intelligence had an overall impact of 60.0% on the job performance of bank employees. The study revealed that when bank employees’ education level increased their job performance, EI level increased simultaneously. Local private banks perform better on those factors than the public banks. According to the regression analysis, EI has an overall impact of 66.6% on private banks and 53.4% on public banks on bank employees’ job performance in the Colombo district. It is recommended that banking institutions include the framework of EI assessment in HRM functions, including employee promotion methods, recruitment and selection criteria to ensure high quality work performance in this industry.