Emotional Intelligence and Effectiveness of Non-Teaching Staff of Public Polytechnics in Southwestern Nigeria

The study examined the impact of emotional intelligence on the effectiveness of non-teaching personnel in the Southwestern Nigerian polytechnics. Emotional intelligence is necessary to handle interpersonal relationships and improve workplace performance. Even though there have been a lot of emphasis on issues such as leadership, motivation and organisational commitment in previous studies as related staff effectiveness in higher education, there has been minimal focus on the problem of emotional intelligence. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design combining quantitative and qualitative (QUAN+qual) methods. and the data were analysed with descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation and regression analysis with a level of significance of 0.05. The results showed that emotional intelligence had a positive correlation with staff effectiveness and significantly contribute to effectiveness (β = 0.324). This suggests that the non-teaching personnel with a higher level of emotional intelligence perform better in discharging their responsibilities. It was concluded that emotional intelligence is an important aspect in improving the effectiveness of non-teaching employees in polytechnics. Therefore, the development of emotional intelligence should be a priority of the polytechnic management in terms of training and capacity-building programmes.