Emotional intelligence and relational trust

The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a relationship between a school principal's emotional intelligence and the relational trust of teachers in the school. Research from Chicago schools demonstrated that schools where relational trust was high out-performed schools where relational trust was not well-evidenced. Goleman's construct of emotional intelligence was the independent variable and Bryk and Schneider's construct of relational trust was the dependent variable. 24 school principals from 3 different school divisions agreed to participate in the study. 10 teachers were randomly selected from each of the 24 schools; 5 teachers were invited to complete the Emotional Social Competence Inventory while 5 different teachers were invited to complete the Teacher-Principal Relational Trust Scale. 12 principals and 112 teachers responded with usable data. Mean scores were calculated for both variables and for the four clusters of emotional intelligence (self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management). Six research questions guided the study: 1) Is there a relationship between principal emotional intelligence and teacher relational trust? 2) Do any clusters of emotional intelligence correlate more highly with ratings of relational trust than others? 3) Are there demographic variables of principals that contribute to variance in measures of emotional intelligence? 4) Are there demographic variables of principals that contribute to variance in measures of relational trust? 5) Are there demographic variables of teachers that contribute to variance in measures of relational trust? 6) Are there demographic variables of teachers that contribute to variance in measures of emotional intelligence?

The correlation between principal emotional intelligence and teacher relational trust was .56 with a significance ofp < .06 while the correlation between the EI cluster relationship management and relational trust was .67 with a significance ofp = .017. Multiple regression on demographic variables of principals was prohibited because of the small sample size while multiple regression on teacher demographic variables revealed no ostensible effect on variance in either variable studied.

The emotional social competencies of conflict management, coaching/mentoring, influence, inspirational leadership, and teamwork play a critical role in fostering teacher-principal trust and should be the foci of administrator professional development.

Note: Abstract extracted from PDF file via OCR.

Digitization of this thesis was made possible by a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, 2015.

Thesis originally deposited on 2016-02-18 in version 1.28 of Libra. This thesis was migrated to Libra2 on 2017-03-23 16:33:42.