Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace : A study on Emotional Intelligence in Workers’ Occupational Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) in the workplace

Abstract: Work-related accidents emerge from potential hazards that can cause different negative outcomes in different situations. Human errors are specific actions that can either directly (active errors) or indirectly (latent errors) cause an accident in the workplace. Nowadays in order to establish an applicable system in the way of maintenance and preferment of a work environment without any accidents that are trying to develop the HSE system. In fact, this management system has been using as a significant tool to control and improve the performance of health and safety and the environment in all development programs of industries and organizations. In this term, one of the important perspectives of HSE management is Emotional Intelligence which deals with the management’s ability and safety performance in the workplace. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Occupational Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) management in the workplace, to reduce industrial incidents of human factors. Therefore, there is a requirement for a better understanding of how Emotional Intelligence factors influence health and safety performance in the workplace. A qualitative study has been done to achieve this purpose. In this case, data has been collected through eight semi-structured interviews with HSE managers and officers that participated from different industries around the world.  The main focus of this collection data was extracting the perspectives of the individual’s views. Afterward, to create a theory, the data has been analyzed according to different steps for a grounded analysis regarding discovering how the Emotional Intelligence factors of employees impact their health and safety performance in the workplace.   The results of this study have shown that there are mainly two areas to study which are key roles of Emotional Intelligence in safety performance and key roles for effective Healthy, Safety, and Environment management. It has shown that the key roles of Emotional Intelligence in safety performance is being able to manage your own and being able to deal with other’s emotions. Besides, key roles for effective Healthy, Safety, and Environment management only three factors have been important to improve the safety act which is being able to make the correct decision in the emergency situation’ and ability to prevent incidents at the workplace as well as the level of perception of risk. These results demonstrated that strong factors of Emotional Intelligence are vital to improve the health and safety performance at the workplace and the improvement of these abilities should be approached for the workplace.