Undergraduate Management Skills Courses And Students’ Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

In this paper, we draw parallels between teaching undergraduate management skills and the emotional intelligence movement: both address the need for personal and interpersonal skills to help one succeed in work and in life, both identify a comprehensive set of skills which can be learned by adults, and both identify various reflective and self-monitoring techniques to learn and teach these skills. Using a pre-test/post-test experimental design, we provide evidence that current methods of teaching management skills to undergraduates also build emotional intelligence. Results of our study show that 121 students taking an undergraduate management skills course significantly improved their emotional intelligence scores during a 16 week semester, while a control group of 113 students taking other business courses did not. We discuss the implications of our results and call for more research and discussion about undergraduate management skill courses and emotional intelligence.