Public Senior High School Social Studies teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and job performance in the Central Region of Ghana the mediating role of emotional intelligence

Abstract

This study investigated the mediating role of emotional intelligence in the effect of selfefficacy beliefs and job performance of Social Studies teachers in public Senior High Schools in Central Region of Ghana within the context of Bandura’s (1976) Social Cognitive Theory. Working within the positivist paradigm, this study employed the cross-sectional descriptive survey design with quantitative approach, where through census sampling technique, 342 Social Studies teachers in the public Senior High Schools in the Central Region of Ghana were selected and participated in the study with the main instrument being questionnaire. After meeting validity and reliability requirements, descriptive and inferential statistics analytical tools were employed to answer the research questions and hypothesis set for the study with the aid of Version 28 of SPSS and AMOS. The findings revealed that Social Studies teachers had very high-level self-efficacy beliefs, high level of emotional intelligence as well as high level of job performance. The findings further established that emotional intelligence statistically significantly predicted the job performance of Social Studies teacher. Besides, it was revealed that emotional intelligence mediated the effect of self-efficacy beliefs on the job performance of Social Studies teachers. The study again established that demographic characteristics such as gender, age and years of teaching experience statistically significantly influenced Social Studies teachers perception on their level of self-efficacy beliefs and emotional intelligence. It was therefore, recommended Ghana Education Service should organize refresher training and continuous professional development programmes in order to sustain, improve, and strengthen the dimensions of self-efficacy beliefs, emotional intelligence and job performance among Social Studies teachers in public Senior High schools in Ghana. The study further recommended that strategies aimed at the improvement of self-efficacy beliefs and job performance should run concurrently with approaches to enhance emotional intelligence of Social Studies teachers to heighten their job performance.