| Summary: | In a fast paced change external and internal business environment in which businesses are to deliver to their maximum capacity, there is little room for resistance to change by employees. Acknowledging all the elements responsible for resistance to change within the corporate world, the study aimed to find if there is any relationship between the emotional intelligence of employees and their resistance to change initiatives which slows down company potential to stay abreast of market needs.
By making use of a 4-point Likert type scale and questionnaire data was collected from 47 pharmaceutical representatives based in 5 different provinces within South Africa. The analysis was done based on a variety of statistical methods such as Mann Whitney, Spearman’s rho’s. The results suggest that there is a definite relationship between the overall emotional intelligence of employees and resistance to change.
The study focusses its efforts on the pharmaceutical industry that offers service and products to healthcare professionals. Perhaps research on other sectors of the business could offer a broader view of the impact of emotional intelligence on resistance to change as the representatives only make up a small proportion of the overall business.
An important insight of this study is that emotional intelligence has proven to play a very significant role in a variety of functions of the business and deserves deeper investigation and attention. Although only a small share of the business formed part of the sample of the study, it is clear that the company has to address resistance to change and the initiators thereof. Little study has been done on the relationship between emotional intelligence and resistance to change within the South African market, adding available data relating to the topic relationship and importance. === MBA, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015
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