March 5th, 2015: Faculty member from the School of Business Administration at Canadian University Dubai (CUD) have picked up the Best Paper Award at the 9th annual Conference on Business Administration held recently in Dubai.
The paper, entitled, "What is the Value of Soft Skills" Emotional Intelligence and Work Values in a Global Work Environment’ was produced by CUD Program Chair and Associate Professor, Dr. Rommel Sergio, in collaboration with faculty members Dr. Maria Jade Opulencia and Ms. Jennifer Gonzales, along with academic colleagues from institutions in the Philippines.
The Conference, sponsored by the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, brought together scholars from across the globe to discuss the latest trends affecting a range of business themes. The team from CUD was invited to present its research findings under the ‘Business and Globalization’ track.
The research paper explored the profile of emotional intelligence and work values among call center representatives (CSRs) from the Middle East, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, India, and the Philippines. It examined emotional intelligence factors such as self-management, social awareness and relationship management, alongside work values such as management, achievement, supervisory relations, way of life, and independence.
Dr. Sergio revealed that, based on the research findings, emotional intelligence can play an important role in defining specific work values.
He explained, “We found that CSRs who are male, younger, and single, as well as those whose work time schedule is opposite to the norm, are more emotionally intelligent that their counterparts. Emotional intelligence is not influenced by age; however, gender, marital status, nationality and work schedules all appear to have an impact on emotional competence among CSRs.
“On the other hand, work-family conflict has been found to be affected by age, marital status, nationality and work schedule, but not by gender. Based on the findings of the study, we can conclude that emotional intelligence plays an important role in specific areas of work values – management, achievement, supervisory relations, way of life, and independence – among CSRs.”
The Award is the latest in a line of honors collected by Dr. Sergio, who is a prominent researcher in the field of human resources, particularly on the subject of emotional intelligence. In 2014 he was awarded the title of Outstanding World Researcher at the International Conference on Multidisciplinary Research.
Dr. Sergio said, “Research is a way of life. Conducting action research depicting storylines of employees across positions in the Middle East remains to be a challenge for most researchers in this part of the world.
“I am always elated to contribute knowledge to the limited baseline literature about the management practices here and in the Gulf Cooperation Countries. We are honored to be part of CUD as our President Dr. Karim Chelli and its community of academicians is always in support of our research undertakings.”
Fellow researcher Dr. Opulencia concluded, “Research for me strengthens the empirical and formal connections between domains of the management/human resource discipline. These contributions will be significant to the field of study and the findings will impact the scholarly community in particular, and humanity in general.”
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