Leveraging Students’ Emotional Intelligence: An intelligent Approach to Higher Education Strategy

This paper explores the relationship between Emotional Intelligence and academic achievement in Business and Management Students, using a mixed methods approach.

In the realm of higher education, the pursuit of excellence is an ongoing endeavour, as institutions strive to enhance students' learning experiences and improve educational outcomes (Zhoc et al., 2018; Zhoc et al., 2020; Meher et al., 2021; Chang et al., 2022; Muhtadi et al., 2022; Quílez-Robers et al., 2023). Emotional Intelligence (EI) emerged as a major phycological construction in the early 1990s. Salovey and Mayer (1990, p. 189) depicted that EI is “…an ability to monitor one’s own feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.” They argued that individuals high in EI had certain emotional abilities and skills related to appraising and regulating emotions in the self and others. Accordingly, it was argued that individuals high in EI could accurately perceive certain emotions in themselves and others (e.g., anger, sadness) and regulate emotions in themselves and others to achieve a range of adaptive outcomes or emotional states (e.g., motivation, creative thinking) (O’Connor et al., 2019).