Emotional Intelligence as an Antecedent of Relational Social Capital

This research investigates the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and relational social capital. EI is regarded as a social competence which facilitates and promotes the quality of interpersonal and social relationships, and relational social capital is a well-known concept representing those individual qualities and resources such as trust, identification, and obligation or commitment which shape high-quality interpersonal relationships. However, no study to date has empirically examined how relational social capital may be predicted by EI as a component of individuals’ social competence. Our main arguments are that the four main dimensions of EI including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management would increase the level of relational social capital among employees. Our structural equation modeling analysis on survey data across 375 employees of 64 randomly selected branches of an Iranian bank shows that although self-management and relationship management dimensions are significantly related to relational social capital, self-awareness and social awareness are not significantly related to this concept.