The relationship between the emotional intelligence domains and driver behaviour in ESKOM: an adult education perspective

[摘要] English: Emotions are one of the factors that define us as human yet, many people do nottruly understand the extent to which our emotions are influenced by the externalenvironment and how we allow emotions to control our behaviour which oftentranslates into physiological and physical risk. The ability to recognise and manageour emotions is central to how we perceive and react to everyday life.Eskom as an organisation is totally committed to providing a safe environment for alltheir employees and no cost is spared in provided what they believe to be the besteducation and training to support their ZERO HARM philosophy. The question ishowever, with the unquestionable commitment to safety from management and staffalike; why is the vehicle incident rate (VIR) remaining at unacceptably high levels?This study was intended to identify the degree to which emotional intelligence, withspecific reference to self-awareness, self-management, social awareness andmanaging relationship's impact on driver specific attitude and behaviour.Emotional self-awareness allows individuals to start understanding how and whythey react to specific external stimuli. Only once individuals recognise andacknowledge their emotions, will they be in a position to control how they react tothese emotions. Understanding one's emotions is only the starting point in learninghow to control your emotions but without this first step, no meaningful change will bepossible.Emotional self-management is more of a process than a change in one's personality.It is the ability to accept one's shortcomings and manage the observable externalresponses to stimuli for the benefit of self and others. self-management is essentiallya skill and as such, must be learned and practiced before it can be perfectedSocial awareness and managing relationships are possibly the more difficultemotional domains to master from a driver perspective, as it may be consideredstrange to think of social reactions with other road users as one's own responsibility.The social domains however, do have serious implications as to how these incidentalrelationships ultimately affect the behaviour of road users. It is clearly documentedthat road rage is common place in our driving culture.Analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data clearly indicates that emotionalinelegance has a significant impact on driver behaviour. The participants in this studysited driver related emotional behaviour to include characteristics associated withroad rage and general emotional incompetence. The quantitative data was lesssignificant in determining the impact of emotional intelligence (El) and driverbehaviour in regard to age, gender and race; the fact remains however that the dataidentified a significant relationship between persons with a low El and vehicleincidents. The analysis of the quantitative data relating to group, age, gender andrace, when viewed against the same participant's qualitative response, as well as thetheoretical arguments presented in this study, would suggest that the qualitative datamay be influenced by response bias. The degree to which response bias may havecontaminated the quantitative data will need to be established through furtherresearch.The recommendations in this study should be addressed in order to test the theoriesdiscussed in the study with the view of authenticating how customised education andtraining can positively impact on driver behaviour and how such education andtraining should be structured.

[发布机构] University of the Free State