Abstract:

Within the last twenty years, the problem of education gained new dimensions, if we were to refer only to the involvement of Howard Gardner (Theory of multiple intelligences) and of Daniel Goleman (Emotional intelligence). These new dimensions of reflecting on personal abilities did not go unnoticed by the academic management personnel, as it is known that the promotion of these concepts gave a new sense to the human personality and explained many of the apparently contradictory problems.
As teachers, we often asked ourselves ”why some of our best students do not become successful people in life?” Or how comes that a student who is regarded as mediocre in school manages, later in life, to have success after success, even though during his academic studies he seemed to like the social part of the activities more than the cognitive one.
Once these questions were answered, new ones came up. Thus, if we accept the idea of the exceptional importance of emotional intelligence, how could we, the professors, develop it? This question gains almost dramatic senses if we refer to the engineering education, given the fact that the studies have shown that, in a hierarchy of professions, the engineer ends up having the lowest emotional intelligence quotient (EQ). Lower than the engineers in this hierarchy there are only the unemployed persons, who might be unemployed because he either completely lacks emotional intelligence or has a very low EQ.
But in order to be able to train the emotional abilities of students, it is necessary that the trainers - the teachers, professors, be not only very good professionals in technical matters, but also have a series of competencies connected to the technical knowledge and regarding the emotional intelligence.
All these considerents constituted the starting point of our research, which focused on the idea of interpreting the link between emotional intelligence and organisational culture. In other words, the authors tried to determine whether the organisational culture existing in an engineering organisation can show the existence or inexistence of the emotional intelligence skills at the level of a group or at the level of individuals.
Thus, the paper started from the analysis of the cultural dimensions at the Faculty of Engineering of the "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu, resulted from earlier studies, in order to monitor the manner in which these reveal the presence or absence of emotional abilities.
The hypotheses from which the study started can be expressed as follows:
1. Cultural dimensions can reveal the emotional intelligence
2. Some cultural dimensions are even predictors of the existence of EI.
In order to check these hypotheses, a research was initiated on the dimensions of the emotional intelligence of professors from the Faculty of Engineering of Sibiu.. The instruments applied for carrying out the research were questionnaires based on The Emotional Intelligence Appraisal™ Me and Multi-Rater Editions, and on the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal Team. These questionnaires are scientifically validated.

Keywords:

emotional intelligence, organisational culture, engineering, academic staff.