The effect of Emotional Intelligence in Nursing performance and stress levels - Essay Example

During the last decade, researches have flourished to define, measure, and differentiate emotional intelligence from other types of intelligence, and examined its value and its relation with other variables, such as behaviors, characteristic, processes, and outcome. Emotional intelligence was also used in the field of psychology, education, business, leadership, and recently health care and nursing. In nursing, the emotional intelligence is a topic of keen interest in these few years (Quoidbach and Hansenne, 2009).

Several claims are reported noting that emotional intelligence does not only play a significant role in nursing but also in other areas, such as, managing emotions, regulating relationships, facilitating decision making and communication, empowering leadership, and as a guide to success and perfection. In contrast, there are some critiques that condemn emotional intelligence for being vague, poorly defined, immeasurable, and over magnified (Smith et al., 2009). Aim of the Paper The aim of this paper is to critically review the literature of emotional intelligence and its effect on improving nursing performance at individual and team levels in addition to reducing stress, burnout and health complains.

The possibility and the degree of enhancing emotional intelligence, and its applicability in real life will be discussed in this paper. The Emotional Intelligence concept has been born in literature by Salovey and Mayer in 1990, who defined it as an ability to inspect, perceive, manage and employ emotions of self and others in order to achieve success. As a result of this concept, Salovey and Mayer (1990) created a model known as The Ability Model. Although emotional intelligence became scientifically noticed within the academic field, it had only bore limited publicity during that time.

Not until the publication of an emotional intelligence book by Goleman in 1995 when it gained its popularity. Goleman's emotional intelligence model called Mixed or Performance Model, is the most popular model, which merges personality traits and emotional domains, and pay attention to performance outcomes. Several emotional intelligence models and tools have emerged thereafter; however, even though these models have used different wordings, the four common domains were still shared by most of these models.

These domains include self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management. The emotional intelligence tools from the aforementioned models varied according to its way of defining, understanding emotional intelligence and the model it’s derived from, but at the end, most of these tools have common purpose which is to measure emotional intelligence with different validity and reliability (Beauvais et al., 2010, Landa et al., 2007, Kooker et al., 2007, and Smith et al., 2009). Search Strategy To begin with, broad scope search was done via several databases and search engine, such as the Emerald, Wiley, Ovid, and Google scholar, but most of the papers were found on Science direct.

At first, the results were as many as 33,318 using emotional intelligence as the key word; nevertheless, the result starts to drop gradually from 10,678 to 79 papers after using more specific key words such as emotional intelligence and performance, emotional intelligence and team, emotional intelli