The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence with Job and Individual Characteristics of Nursing Staff

Introduction: Nursing Known as a stressful and overwhelming profession. Due to the stressful nature of the nursing job, nurses experience burnout more than any other occupation, which may affect the quality of health care. Emotional intelligence is one of the important predictors of psychological well-being and it plays an important role as a distinguishing factor for organizational performance and achievement of job success. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between emotional intelligence and nurses' personal and occupational characteristics.   Material and method:  In this cross-sectional analytical study, 135 nursing staff working in Gonabad hospitals was selected through a census sampling method. Written informed consent of nurses and working in hospitals of Gonabad city were the inclusion criteria and Failure to complete the questionnaires or the questionnaire being confounded or withdrawal from the study was considered as the exclusion criteria. They were evaluated by Shirring Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire and Demographic Information Form. The research data were analyzed using SPSS software version 16, Chi-square test, one-way ANOVA and Pearson correlation coefficient. The significance level was less than 0.05. Results: In this study72.6% of participants were women. The majority of nurses were married (81.5%) and 87.4% of nursing staff had high emotional intelligence. In this study, there was no significant relationship between individual characteristics and emotional intelligence, but there was a significant association between job characteristics, job shift (P = 0.03) and employment status (P = 0.03) with total emotional intelligence. The results showed that there was a significant relationship between social consciousness with education level (p = 0.019) and employment status (p = 0.001) and there was a significant relationship between social skills with work shift (p = 0.003) and nurses' marital status (p = 0.007) Conclusion: According to the findings, considering the appropriate job shifts for nurses and formalizing them to create a strong organizational commitment to take benefit of nurses with higher emotional intelligence and this leads to improved performance of nurses.