Emotional intelligence, self-resilience and academic performance amongst the postgraduate students at the faculty of education, UiTM Puncak Alam, Selangor, Malaysia

While existing literature has explored the individual influences of emotional intelligence and self-resilience towards academic performance, a notable gap persists in understanding their relationships, particularly within the under-researched postgraduate setting. Hence, this study aims to investigate the relationship between emotional intelligence and self-resilience towards academic performance amongst the postgraduate students at the Faculty of Education, UiTM Puncak Alam, Selangor, Malaysia. This study was guided by five research objectives and eight research questions. The instruments used to measure and collect the quantitative data were from Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLEIS) by Wong and Law (2002), Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) by Connor & Davidson (2003), and a merged scale of Individual Work Performance Questionnaire (IWPQ) by Koopmans (2012) and Academic Performance Scale by McGregory (2015). A descriptivecorrelational study using a mixed-methods research design was employed to explore the relationship among 105 postgraduate students at the Faculty of Education. Findings from the quantitative data indicated that first, the respondents have high level of emotional intelligence (M=3.29, SD=.39), who seemed to use their emotion better compared to the regulation of emotion. Second, the respondents rated high level of selfresilience (M=3.37, SD=.34), focusing into spiritual influence and personal competency. Third, respondents also rated high level of academic performance (M=3.39, SD=.37), especially in the contextual and adaptive performance dimensions. Fourth, the findings revealed that there was a significant, positive and moderate relationship between emotional intelligence and academic performance (r=.509), suggesting that the higher the emotional intelligence, the higher the academic performance of the respondents. Fifth, there was a significant, positive and strong relationship between self-resilience and academic performance (r=.742), indicating the higher their self-resilience, the higher the academic performance. Sixth, the regression analysis indicated that 34.4% (r2 =.344) of the variance in academic performance can be predicted from emotional intelligence, while 69.3% (r2 =.693) can be predicted from self-resilience. Seventh, the qualitative findings tend to triangulate the quantitative findings indicating that the respondents agreed both emotional intelligence and selfresilience tend to influence their academic performance. However, there were also respondents who tend to disagree. Last, qualitative findings revealed that there were three main factors that contribute to respondents’ academic performance; supportive learning environment, personal motivation and self-management, and effective learning strategies. Consequently, all the findings lead to several implications, such as the extension of the corpus of knowledge, theoretical, policy and training implications in the area of educational management and leadership amongst the postgraduate students in higher learning institution.