Social intelligence and peculiarities of managerial decision-making by higher education students studying in the speciality “Law Enforcement”

It is emphasised that the developed social intelligence is an important property of the subject of managerial activity, which allows building more effective interpersonal relationships in terms of achieving the goal, including vertical ones: manager-subordinate. The article presents the results of an empirical study on the relationships between the components of the structure of social intelligence abilities and the peculiarities of managerial decision-making (“Power” and “Behaviour in a problem situation”) of higher education students studying in the speciality “Law Enforcement”. The study involved the first-year students of the Military Law Institute of the Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University, studying “Law Enforcement”. The empirical data were obtained using the psychodiagnostic methodology of social intelligence research by J. Guilford and M. Sullivan and the questionnaire “Assessment of Management Decision-Making Styles”. It is proved that the orientation of future law enforcement officers to achieve results by any means, even the most severe ones, building relationships with subordinates on the basis of unquestioning subordination, emphasising their own status as a leader are closely related to the level of social intelligence and are reliably related to the level of development of the ability to predict the consequences of the behaviour of others in a given situation and to understand the logic of interaction situations and the significance of people's behaviour in these situations. A special place is shown for the ability to logically generalise, to identify common essential features in various non-verbal reactions of a person regarding styles of managerial decision-making. The level of social intelligence and most of the abilities that determine it had a reliable feedback with the pole “Production of a problem situation (decision-making situation)” in future law enforcement officers. Thus, the desire to avoid a decision-making situation is probably related to the unpreparedness of higher education students at this stage of their professional development to make managerial decisions and the need to improve skills in developing and making managerial decisions when forming a soft skills case, which should be given special attention.