Emotional Intelligence in Action: How Leading Teachers in the Maldives Resolve Conflict, Sustain Self-Awareness, and Motivate Peers

Emotional Intelligence is widely recognized as a critical leadership competency in education, influencing teacher wellbeing, and organizational effectiveness. In the Maldivian education system, Senior Management Team face ongoing challenges such as classroom conflicts, low teacher morale, and emotionally demanding work environments. Despite increasing attention to EQ, limited research has examined how leading teachers enact EQ in their everyday leadership practices within this context. This study addresses this gap by exploring how leading teachers apply EQ to manage conflicts, sustain self-awareness, and motivate teachers experiencing low morale. A qualitative phenomenological design was selected to gain a deep, experiential understanding of how leading teachers subjectively interpret and navigate emotional dynamics in real-time. The study explored the lived experiences of 17 purposively selected leading teachers, a sample size aligning with qualitative guidelines and sufficient for reaching data saturation. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed using thematic analysis guided by Braun and Clarke’s (2006) framework. The findings indicate that for conflict management (RQ1), leading teachers rely on empathy and active listening, to sustain self-awareness (RQ2), they utilize mindful self-reflection and emotional regulation, and to motivate peers (RQ3), they apply recognition and compassionate flexibility. These findings extend transformational leadership theory by providing a culturally contextualized framework that maps Goleman's EQ model onto the collectivist, community-oriented dynamics of small island developing states. Future research should examine longitudinal effects of EQ-based leadership interventions and culturally responsive adaptations across diverse educational settings.