Description:

The pressure for performance in the industries has certainly lead to emotional disturbances affecting the quality of working life of the employees. An emotionally intelligent employee can better contribute to the humanization of work atmosphere and democratization of work relations. The purpose of this study is to identify the intermediating variables that influence both emotional intelligence (EI) and quality of working life (QWL) for future research. Emotional intelligence is an individual parameter, whereas quality of working life is an organizational parameter, therefore to understand the association between these two, it is essential to explore both the person and the environment together to explain the person-environment interaction. Our study intends to fulfill this gap, by hypothesizing that, employee's perception on quality of working life, depends on his/her emotional intelligence. The inductive and deductive analysis of an exhaustive literature on emotional intelligence and quality of working life has revealed that irrespective of any reference/model considered for defining EI, it will have relevance for developing one's perceived QWL. The study has also identified the contextual moderation of some of the behavioral and attitudinal dimensions like relationship management, organizational citizenship behavior, job satisfaction, affective commitment, stress management and performance, as interlinking variables be-tween EI and QWL. Therefore it is concluded that any HRD program intended for improving the employees perception on quality of working life in the organizational setting should focus on their emotional intelligence training, for the appraisal of emotional connection to the content and context of their work.

Understanding and dealing with human resources is a key function in any organization, despite of its technical expertise. But a longitudinal analysis of HR publications over the past 30 years (1976-2005) has reported a stable research gap in areas like motivation, employee/labor relations and human resource developments (Deadrick and Gibson, 2009). Therefore focus on these topics has become the need of the hour for both corporate and academicians for better human resource development.