Influence of Emotional Intelligence on Work Performance among Nurses in Health Facilities in Nakuru County

Abstract

The numerous occupational risks that nurses in particular routinely face have an unavoidable effect on their capacity to complete their assigned jobs. This is because of the extraordinarily difficult and demanding circumstances in which they work, which have a tendency to disturb their emotional balance and result in pervasive feelings of powerlessness and rage. Therefore, emotional intelligence could potentially be having a significant and potentially negative bearing on nurses’ work performance. The outcomes of past research examining how emotional intelligence affects nurses' effectiveness at work, nevertheless, have been inconsistent. This research was keen on emphatically examining if emotional intelligence determined the nurses’ performance working in sub-county public hospitals in Nakuru County, Kenya. The specific objectives were to ascertain how interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills, adaptability and stress management impacted on the performance of nurses in sub-county public hospitals in Nakuru County. The logic model of medical health authored by Donabedian was adopted to guide the study. The study's participants were 345 nurses and 21 ward-in-charges from medical facilities in 11 sub-county public hospitals in Nakuru County. The public hospitals were clustered according to the 11 administrative sub counties of Nakuru County. In order to identify the study participants, with a total of 187 nurses, purposive sampling was employed to choose the nurses at sub-county public hospitals in Nakuru County. Data were gathered using closed-ended questionnaire with 5-point likert categories on Likert scales. Data was collected after approval from the Ethics Committee and the national council of technology. Pretesting of the questionnaires was done in the burns unity which is a department with the highest number of nurses. Consultation with the supervisors helped to ensure the validity of the research tool. Descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to evaluate quantitative data using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25. The study established that interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills, adaptability and stress management accounted for the total variance in the work performance of nurses in sub-county public hospitals in Nakuru County. It was concluded that only stress management significantly predicted the nurses’ performance. Nurses who managed stress were 15.333 times more likely to perform better than nurses who were not able to managed stress. Intrapersonal, interpersonal and adaptability had little influence on the nurses' ability to do their jobs. However, where nurses had intrapersonal skills they were 2.159 times better than those without intrapersonal skills. Where nurses had interpersonal skills, they were 2.083 times more likely to perform their work than those who did not have interpersonal skills. The study recommended that the hospital management should support nurses in discharging their duties by creating an enabling environment that allows nurses to work under flexible conditions.