Linking Kindness to Emotional Intelligence for Employee Satisfaction & Retention Through Professional Development Training

The present study aimed to examine the effects of linking kindness to emotional intelligence (EI) for employee satisfaction and retention through professional development training. 240 participants from two separate research sites from Associations (Corporate Offices) of the leading non-profit organization in the United States of America were asked to participate in a pre-test survey on kindness, administered through Survey Monkey, and another survey on emotional intelligence administered through MHS Assessments of the EI Consortium. The author took into consideration the non-profit’s Leadership Competency Model broken down into Leaders, which includes employees without supervision responsibilities; Team Leaders, made up of directors with responsibility for staff and programs; Multi-Team Leaders, which includes directors with oversight for Association-wide disciplines such as Marketing and Human Resources Management; and Organizational Leaders, made up of C-Suite leaders such as CEO and CFO. Following the pre-test survey conducted in June 2019 a training workshop intervention was held on October 23, 2019, with 29 employees across the leadership spectrum, in attendance. On January 23, 2020, the post-test survey was held with the same number of participants requested to participate. It is important to note that for the kindness survey, twenty-four character strengths, including kindness, and developed by Peterson and Seligman, were used and the MSCEIT developed by Mayor, Salovey, Caruso was used for emotional intelligence. The results showed minor differences in both the kindness and EI surveys from pre-test to post-test in all the areas studies. It was interesting to note, however, that there was a slight change in the Means of the VIA kindness scale, in kindness and love in pre-test over post-test.

The author wishes to indicate that there were no survey questions in either constructs that included employee satisfaction and/or employee retention and even if there were, there was not sufficient time to observe any noticeable effects on employee satisfaction and or employee retention since the time between pre-test, training intervention and post-test was limited to less than six months.