The Relationship between Spiritual Intelligence / Quotient (SQ) and Teaching Competency in Medical Faculty Members

Introduction: Finding and applying all factors affecting the teachers’ ability, is the key to improving the quality of higher education. Recently, promotion of SQ has been introduced as a factor in improving the quality of performance in employees. Therefore, in order to investigate this issue more carefully, this study basically aimed to determine the relationship between SQ and teaching competency in Mashhad medical faculty members. Methods: This research is a descriptive, cross-sectional study on 160 medical faculty members as subjects (32 basic science faculty members, 128 clinical science faculty members) using stratified random sampling in medical faculty. King’s SQ questionnaire and teaching competency self-assessment instrument of Alabama University were used. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and analytical tests such as spearman correlation, T student, two- way ANOVA, Mann-Withney, Kruskal-wallis, Friedman, and Chi-square. Results: The mean score of SQ was 63.0±1.2, which was moderate the median score of teaching competency was 92.0 with the minimum score of 39.0 and maximum score of 112.0 There was a significant correlation (p<0.001) between SQ and teaching competency (rs=0.31). Conclusion: Faculty members’ spiritual intelligence was assessed moderately. There is a positive relationship between spiritual intelligence and teaching competency more studies exploring the nature of this relationship are suggested. Also further studies are needed to be done on factors that affecting SQ and teaching competency.