Development of the Emotional Intelligence Scale

This paper describes the development of the Emotional intelligence Scale EI(PcSc)scale as tested on pilot study of 200 respondents. The EI(PcSc)scale is a self-report questionnaire comprising two parts: personal competence and social competence that measures six facets of emotional intelligence in the workplace. Estimates of internal consistency for the subscales ranged from .78 to .91. Indexing terms/


INTRODUCTION
Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the ability to perceive, control and evaluate emotions (Mehta &Singh,2013). Some researchers suggest that emotional intelligence can be learned and strengthened, while others claim it is an inborn characteristic. Since 1990, Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer have been the leading researchers on emotional intelligence. In their influential article "Emotional Intelligence," they defined emotional intelligence as, "the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions" (1990). Daniel Goleman developed a framework of five elements that define emotional intelligence as: Self-Awareness -People with high emotional intelligence are usually very self-aware. They understand their emotions, and because of this, they don't let their feelings rule them. They're confidentbecause they trust their intuition and don't let their emotions get out of control.They're also willing to take an honest look at themselves. They know their strengths and weaknesses, and they work on these areas so they can perform better. Many people believe that this self-awareness is the most important part of emotional intelligence.
Self-Regulation -This is the ability to control emotions and impulses. People who self-regulate typically don't allow themselves to become too angry or jealous, and they don't make impulsive and careless decisions. They think before they act. Characteristics of self-regulation are thoughtfulness, comfort with change, integrity, and the ability to say no.
Motivation -People with a high degree of emotional intelligence are usually motivated. They're willing to defer immediate results for long-term success. They're highly productive, love a challenge and are very effective in whatever they do.
Empathy -Empathy is the ability to identify with and understand the wants, needs, and viewpoints of those around you. People with empathy are good at recognizing the feelings of others, even when those feelings may not be obvious. As a result, empathetic people are usually excellent at managing relationships, listening, and relating to others. They avoid stereotyping and judging too quickly, and they live their lives in a very open & honest way.
Social Skills -It's usually easy to talk to and like people with good social skills, another sign of high emotional intelligence. Those with strong social skills are typically team players. Rather than focus on their own success first, they help others develop and shine. They can manage disputes, are excellent communicators, and are masters at building and maintaining relationships. The ability to manage people and relationships is very important in all leaders, so developing and using your emotional intelligence can be a good way to show others the leader inside of you.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Numerous researches have been undertaken in the field of emotional intelligence and to establish its relationship with other variables like academic achievement, personality, stress, individual performance, conflict, leadership etc.  Spector and Goh,2001).Kauts and D e c e m b e r , 2 0 1 3 Saroj (2010) noticed emotional intelligence to be a factor useful in reducing occupational stress of teachers and enhancing their effectiveness in teaching. Ayoko, Callan and Hartel (2008) suggested that teams with less well-defined emotional intelligence climates were associated with increased task and relationship conflict and increased conflict intensity. Godse and Thingujam (2010), Srinivasan and George (2005), Jordan and Troth (2004) suggested different problems expect different styles of handling and emotionally intelligent individuals are capable of applying the different and better style of conflict management styles as the situation demands. Lenaghan, Buda and Eisner (2007) and Carmeli (2003) revealed that employees who score high in emotional intelligence are more able to balance work-family conflict as they recognize and manage feelings of conflict as they occur.
Trabun (2002), Sitter (2004) and Suhaila and Zahra (2013) noticed the significant and positive relationship between leadership styles and emotional intelligence. Barling, Slater and Kelloway (2000), Mandell and Pherwani (2003), Webb (2004), Srivastva and Bharamanaikar (2004) analysed the predictive positive relationship of emotional intelligence with transformational leadership style. Boyatzis and Ratti (2009) in their study identified competencies that differentiated effective managers and leaders. Results suggested that emotional, social and cognitive intelligence competencies predict performance.
Given the paucity of studies that have measured EI as a multifaceted construct in academic settings, the purpose of the present research is to develop and validate such an EI measure which is comprehensive and covers two broad aspects of personal and social competence which were further divided into six sub scales. For this, EI (PcSc)scale was designed.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE SCALE [EI(PcSc)scale]
Based on the review of literature and to bridge the gaps in the exhaustive pool of the research available on the subject, the present construct was designed .
Daniel goleman (1995,1998)proposed five skill domains that comprise EI. Mayer and Salovey (1993; in their scale incorporated dimensions like self awareness, self regulation,motivation,empathy and social skills. Weisinger(1998) introduced emotional mentoring in his scale which covered five related dimensions.The above mentioned studies helped in outlining the various elements of Emotional intelligence scale [EI(PcSc)scale].
Additionally, the commonly used instruments to measure emotional intelligence viz.,Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional intelligence test (MSCEIT), Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i), Emotional competence inventory(ECI), Emotional Intelligence appraisal (EIA), Work Profile Questionnaire-Emotional Intelligence Version (WPQei), Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) and Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SREIT )served as the basis for generating a pool of 75 items for the EI(PcSc)scale.
The overall aim was to construct the EI(PcSc)scale so that: (a) the items were simple and relatively neutral in wording; and (b) it covered two broad aspects: personal and social competence.Some of the original questions were altered in order to make the wording self explanatory.The initial pool of items was revised based on discussions and feedback from colleagues, postgraduate teachers of psychology and doctorates in psychology. The EI(PcSc)scale was then pre-tested using a convenience sample of teachers at six schools located in urban Ludhiana. These teachers were asked to think of their present job or a previous job while completing the questionnaire.

Description of the tool
The EI(PcSc)scale has been designed to measure the emotional intelligence with a special focus on two subscales comprising personal and social competence.Being emotionally intelligent person means having competence in knowing and managing emotions of self and of others. Several researches has also incorporated both self and social awareness of emotions while measuring total emotional intelligence. (Petrides 2009;Schutte, et al. (1998). D e c e m b e r , 2 0 1 3 In the scale, personal and social competence are further divided into three parameters termed as 'SSEs'. Personal competence outline SSE's as S -Self awareness, S-Self motivation and E -emotion regulation.While SSE's of social competence are being termed as S-Social awareness, S-social skills and E-Emotional receptivity.
The EI(PcSc)scale is a 69-item self report measure that include items such as " I am result-oriented with high drive to meet objectives and goals" and "I manage my impulsive feelings and disappointing emotions well". The scale exhibited correlations with theoretically related constructs, such as emotion expression, emotion managment, impulsiveness, self-esteem, optimism, mood repair, well-being, interpersonal skills, relationship management, emotional mentoring and emotional resilience (Weisinger, 1998;Duleicz and Higgs ,1999;Schutte et al. 1998).
The EI(PcSc)scale employs a 5-point Likert scale with the following anchors: (1)extremely low competence (2), low competence (3), not sure (4), high competence (5),extremely high competence. The scale contains 69 items after creating a pool of 75 items representing a variety of aspects of emotional intelligence. The study utilised expert evaluation to establish validity and readability of the scale. A pilot test was conducted with a view to study the factor structure of the scale.The results of factor analysis predicted what appeared to be a general factor of emotional intelligence.The 69 items which were loaded on Factor1 represented mode categories such as Self awareness, Self Motivation and Emotion Regulation in Part A(Personal competence) and Social Awareness, Social skills and Emotional receptivity in Part B (Social competence).It predicted that the scale measured a homogenous construct of emotional intelligence.
EI(Pc Sc)scale measures personal competence and social competence as two separate dimensions.The summated scores of personal and social competence give the total emotional intelligence score. It also measures the sub parts known as SSE in both the categories. In Part A, it covers the SSE for personal competence which is broadly classified as Self awareness, Self Motivation and Emotion Regulation. In Part B, it incorporates the SSE for social competence which is broadly classified as Social Awareness, Social skills and Emotional receptivity.

3.Emotional Receptivity
The operational definitions of the EI(PcSc) scale are : Self-awareness is the capacity to perceive the self in relatively objective terms. Self-awareness involves an interaction between thoughts and feelings.In case of emotional intelligence it implies being aware of one's positive as well as negative emotions in a particular situation or a set of circumstances.
Self motivation is the ability to do what needs to be done, without getting influenced from other people or situations. People with self motivation can find a reason and strength to complete a task, even in challenging situations and circumstances, without giving up or needing others to encourage them.
Emotion regulation is the capacity to notice and control one's emotions. It is the ability to respond to the range of emotions in a manner that is socially acceptable.It lays emphasis on being flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions. Social skills is the ability to communicate, persuade, and interact with other members of the society, without undue conflict or disharmony. It is the ability to express both positive and negative feelings in the interpersonal context.Social skills take into account art of convincing and the ability to create friendly atmosphere at work settings.It also lays emphasis on dealing with difficult people and upsetting situations tactfully.

Scoring method:
The respondents were provided with 5 alternatives to give the responses ranging from extremely low competence to extremely high competence. The scoring was done on a range of 1 to 5 with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest score. The coding was reversed in certain items( mentioned in table 2). Its not easy for me to accurately reflect people's feeling back to them.

Emotional Receptivity
Based on the results of the discussions held with colleagues, faculty members and doctrates of psychology and managment, given item complexity, low levels of variance and high levels of skewedness and kurtosis, few items were discarded.The remaining 69 items formed the EI(PcSc)scale.
A high score indicated higher emotional intelligence in a particular sub scale category and low score indicated low emotional intelligence in a particular sub scale category. The total of all the sub scales were added to get the total emotional intelligence score.

Steps in Developing a Scale Measuring Emotional Intelligence
The understanding of emotional intelligence as reflected in the definition above offers the possibility to derive an empirical questionnaire of EI (PcSc) Scale. In the following sections of the study, developement of EI (PcSc) Scale will be presented by describing the operationalization process and then will be validated through a series of studies. Rigorous measurement development is important for social scientific research in order to gain valid and reliable data.

Study 1 : Item Generation and Content Validation:
Starting from the definition of emotional intelligence and from the review of the literature dealing with emotional intelligence and emotion management , an initial pool of 80 items was retrieved (see Table 3 for first development step). In an iterative process with the colleagues of the Institute , faculty of other institutes, Psychology and management faculty members with the topic of emotional intelliegence, the initial pool of items was reduced and partly reformulated. This step focussed on the extent to which the items could address parts of the definition of Emotional intelligence dimensions.Those items that did not fit well were deleted. The result was a preliminary scale of 74 items.

Study 2 :
D e c e m b e r , 2 0 1 3 The preliminary 74-item pool was presented to a sample of teachers teaching postgraduate classes in Ludhiana city. Fifty teachers teaching in various schools of urban Ludhiana participated in the study to predict the content validity. The participants were given a questionnaire with 74 items referring to the items of personal and social emotional competence. The items were randomly ordered out of which few were reversely coded also.They also received the definitions of each emotional intelligence construct with the number of items per construct. The participants were then instructed to assign each item to one of the emotional intelligence constructs. This step helps to ensure a preliminary analysis of the content adequacy and the distinctiveness to related emotional intelligence constructs. As this step can be regarded here as a preliminary study with relatively few participants, emotional intelligence items with a consent rate of 70% were considered acceptable and were thus included in the following studies. Those items that did not meet the criteria were reformulated though no item was deleted in this step.

Study 3 :
The retrieved items obtained in study 2 (after rewriting and modification)were then presented to experts who hold doctrate degree in psychology and managment stream. Two doctral students were also included in this study.The expert rating is a further step in establishing content validity (Schriesheim et al. 1993). These experts included national and internationally renowned researchers in the fields of emotional intelligence, personality and organisation behavior, a corporate trainer working for employees' training and development, as well as doctoral students pursuing resereach in the field of leadership and personality. Altogether ten experts evaluated the items (see Table 3). The experts were presented with the items and the definition of emotional intelligence dimensions. In an iterative process, the reserachers of this study also discussed the items with them. The items were assessed on the basis of their content adequacy (i.e., how well the items predict or reflect parts of the definition of emotional intelligence) and how well all items together cover the full domain of emotional intelligence construct In addition, the reserachers of the study ensured that the items were formulated and modified according to common suggestions of constructing questionnaires like being brief, specific, clear and no duplication of questions At the end of this evaluation, a pool of 69 items remained. The experts suggested modification of some typical words with easy and simple words, like 'candid feedback' in one of the item to be relaced by 'open feedback', 'unflappable moments' to 'frustrating moments' and 'foster communication' to be replaced by 'open communication'.

Factor Analysis and Internal Consistency
The empirical validation of the EI (PcSc) scale started with an exploratory approach. In the previous stages, the initial items were reduced, reformulated and validated to a final scale of EI(PcSc) scale of emotional intelligence.Factor analysis was conducted to validate the scale.Factor analysis aims at discovering an empirical connection among variables and to identify the emotional intelligence components. In this case, it was looked at which items of the initial item pool best represented the underlying construct of emotional intelligence. Also it helps to decide which variables are truly relevant for explaining emotional intelligence and to reduce the item pool to the main variables. Additionally, the internal consistency of the extracted items was estimated by calculating Cronbach's alpha values for all the dimensions of personal competence (self awareness, self motivation, emotion regulation) and social competence ( social awareness, social skills and emotional receptivity) of emotional intelligence and emotional intelligence seperately.The values for internal reliability for each of the EI (PcSc) subscales and the total Emotional intelligence were found good.The total emotional intelligence reliability coefficient value was found to be .91 while the reliability coefficients of the various subscales varied from .78 to .91. Table 4 and 5 shows the factor analysis and reliability coefficients for each EI dimension. The 69 items retrieved from study 2 were administered to a sample of 200 school teachers of Ludhiana city, Punjab. Seventy nine percent of the sample consisted of women teaching in schools. Teachers selected for the study were from both private and government schools. Eighty one percent of participants were married while rest were unmarried. For the empirical analysis, the participants who had more than 1 year of work experience were selected. This resulted in a final sample of 178 teachers, 22 teachers were not included in the study as they were having less than one yr experience.

CONCLUSION
The purpose of this study was to develop and validate an emotional intelligence scale EI(PcSc). This study examined the psychometric properties of the EI (PcSc) scale on a sample 200 teachers. The results of the study strongly predicted that the scale performs exceptionally well as a general measure of emotional intelligence with acceptable internal consistency and construct validity. The measure has excellent face-validity-with items chosen to reflect a very wide range of issues relevant to emotional intelligence. D e c e m b e r , 2 0 1 3 D e c e m b e r , 2 0 1 3 D e c e m b e r , 2 0 1 3 Namrata Singh is working as a Lecturer in Guru Nanak Institute of Management & Technology, Ludhiana. She has 6 years' experience in industry and academics. She holds master's degree (with distinction) in Business Administration and is UGC-NET qualified.She is pursuing Ph.d in management titled " Relationship between emotional intelligence, personality and teacher effectiveness."