On the Association between Emotional Intelligence and Burnout Syndrome: The Case of Iranian EFL Teachers

The present study investigated Iranian institute EFL teachers’ feeling of burnout and its relationship with emotional intelligence. To this end, two questionnaires, namely Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educator Survey (MBI-ES) (Maslach, Jackson and Schwab, 1996), and Emotional Intelligence (EI) (Bar-On, 1997), were administered to 160 Iranian institute EFL teachers. The analysis of the findings through Pearson correlation revealed that all of the emotional intelligence sub-scales had a significantly negative correlation with the emotional exhaustion, however, only interpersonal subscale had a significant positive correlation with the personal accomplishment (r= .214, p= .006) and only adaptability subscale had a significantly negative correlation with depersonalization (r= -.360, p= .000). The findings showed that EI was reversely correlated with burnout (r= -.296, p= .000). It was also concluded that Iranian EFL teachers suffer from the moderate levels of burnout. Finally, statistically significant differences among teachers burnout (but not their EI) were found with respect to gender. The findings revealed that female teachers’ burnout level was significantly higher than that of males. The results offer strategies for teachers and authorities to combat burnout for better teacher productivity.