Emotional intelligence buffers stress: a study on emotional intelligence and coping styles

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to restrain negative feelings of anger, stress and anxiety, and focus on positive feelings of patience, confidence and empathy. Emotional Intelligence has an impact on work-related outcomes as employees are stressed and insecure in work environment. Coping Styles refer to what a person thinks or does to manage an emotional encounter. It can be described in terms of responses, tactics, strategies, cognitions or behavior. The purpose of this project is to find out the relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Coping Styles. Emotional intelligence (EI) plays an important role in coping with stress and improving the performance of the individual. The standardized questionnaires on Emotional Intelligence and Coping Styles were used to collect the primary data. The secondary data was collected from research papers and journals. 150 employees from IT sector were taken as sample for the study. Correlation and regression through SPSS were conducted to analyze and interpret the result. The obtained values of (r =.42) and (R square =.18) reflect that Emotional Intelligence has a moderate positive relationship with coping styles for stress in the employees of IT industry and there may be other factors also which affect the coping styles of the individuals in the organization. The present research can be further extended to study the other factors which affect the coping styles of the individuals.