The Mediating Role of Emotional Intelligence in the Relationship between the Stress Caused by Covid-19 and Productivity of South Khorasan Gas Company’s Employees

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the stress caused by Covid 19 on individual performance with a mediating role of emotional intelligence. The present study is an applied research in terms of purpose and a descriptive-correlational research in terms of data collection procedure. This research was conducted among 250 employees of South Khorasan Gas Company. Using Cochran's formula, the number of sample size was 152 people who were selected by simple random sampling procedure. The required data was gathered using standard questionnaires; for the questions related to the stress caused by Covid-19 Thorsen et al.'s questionnaire (2010), for the questions related to individual performance the Romas Villagrasa questionnaire (2019), and for the questions related to emotional intelligence the Weng and Lau questionnaire (2002) were used. In addition to using standard questionnaires, the face validity of the data collection instrument was approved by the relevant experts. Moreover, the reliability of the final questionnaire, measured by Cronbach's alpha, was reported to be 0.805 and favorable. The data were analyzed using SPSS and AMOS software and the hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling. The results of the data analysis showed that the stress caused by Covid-19 has a negative effect on the personal performance of employees and their emotional intelligence. Additionally, it was found that emotional intelligence has a positive significant effect on the employees’ individual performance and that their emotional intelligence has a mediating role in the relationship between the stress caused by Covid-19 and their individual performance.