Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Conflict Resolution Ability of Secondary School Students

Emotional intelligence is the ability of an individual to identify, understand, perceive and control the emotions. This enables an individual to have knowledge about his own emotions as well as the emotions of others. Emotional intelligence can help an individual to manage his feeling and emotions. All this aids an individual to face the challenges and to deal with the conflicts of life. Emotional intelligence may affect the use of different modes of conflict resolutions also. With this view, an attempt was made to study the relationship between emotional intelligence and conflict resolution ability of secondary school students. The objective of the study was to find out the relationship between emotional intelligence and five types of conflict resolution abilities i.e. competing, accommodating, avoiding, collaborating and compromising of secondary school students of government and non-government schools. Survey method was employed in the present study. A random sample of 960 students of government and non-government secondary schools of district Haridwar was selected for the study. Emotional Intelligence Inventory developed by S.K. Mangal and ShubhraMangal and Conflict Resolution Ability Scale developed by P. Srivastava, P. Kumar and A. Mittal was used for data collection. Data was analysed through Pearson Coefficient of Correlation. The findings revealed a significant and positive correlation of all the four dimensions of emotional intelligence i.e. intrapersonal awareness, interpersonal awareness, intrapersonal management and interpersonal management with all the five modes of conflict resolution i.e. competing, accommodating, avoiding, collaborating and compromising. Different pattern of preferences was observed among the students of government and non-government secondary schools. Secondary school students who had high emotional intelligence preferred to use avoiding mode most but tend to use competing mode of conflict resolution least. On the contrary, secondary school students of government schools who possessed high emotional intelligence preferred to use compromising mode most but used accommodating mode of conflict resolution least. It was found that secondary school students of non-government schools who had high emotional intelligence used accommodating mode most, but used competing mode of conflict resolution least.