TUMS Hospital Managers’ Occupational Burnout and Its Relationship with Their Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

Background and Aim: Occupational burnout is one of the aspects of psychological hazards. One of the most important factors that can predict it is emotional intelligence. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of emotional intelligence on occupational burnout among the managers of Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS) selected hospitals. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional descriptive and analytical study in 2014. The subjects were senior, middle and executive managers of TUMS affiliated hospitals. Census was used in this study. Ninety questionnaires were distributed in accordance with the population size. For data collection, Maslach Burnout Inventory (with reliability and retest coefficients of 0.71-0.9 and 0.6-0.8, respectively), Intelligence Questionnaire by Bradberry and Greaves (with reliability and validity of 0.83 and 0.67, respectively) and demographicprofile questionnaire were used. All statistical analyses were performed by SPSS software. Results: There was no significant relationship between job burnout and demographic variables (e.g. work experience, management experience, education, gender, marital status and occupational position). Emotional intelligence of managers and its subscales were high. The highest and lowest scores of emotional intelligence component belonged to relationship management and social awareness, respectively. There was no meaningful relationship between job burnout and emotional intelligence at the error level of 5% and P-value=0.63. Conclusion: Since managers’ social awareness was at a low level, by improving it, we can help their emotional intelligence increase; also by identifying the factors affecting hospital managers’ occupational burnout, we can help it decrease.

Keywords

• emotional intelligence
• occupational burnout
• hospital managers