29 International Journal of Economics and Management Sciences Vol. 1, No. 6, 2012, pp. 29-34 MANAGEMENT JOURNALS managementjournals.org IMPACT OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE COMPETENCIES ON IMPRESSION CREATION: Exploring the Mediating Role of Impression Management Skills Alina Ali 1 , Amir Gulzar *2 1 Foundation University Islamabad, E-mail: leena517@hotmail.com *2 Corresponding author: Foundation University Islamabad, E-mail: amirgulzar@hotmail.com ABSTRACT The study intends to find out the impact of the emotional intelligence competencies on impression management skills and impression creation. It further investigates the mediating role of impression management skills with social and personal competencies and impression creation. The study was conducted from 200 employees of different franchises of the telecom companies. Correlation, regression and Sobel test were used to analyze and interpret the data. The results showed more impact of social competencies as compare to personal competencies on the impression management skills and impression creation. Research study further found that impression management mediates both of the relation i.e. relationship of the personal competencies and image creation and relationship of social competencies and image creation. 1. INTRODUCTION Why one individual gets more favorable attitude of manager when compared to other individual of equal performance and importance for the organization? It is the reality of the organizations that numbers of employees are with such skills which create their better relation with seniors. The secret could be revealed by the concept of impression management. Many people either for the increases in salary, securing the job, getting the benefits or for any other reasons try to develop a better image of theirs in the eyes of the seniors. The process is known as impression management (Ronald R. Sims, 2002). Emotional intelligence is defined as “ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions” (Salovey & Mayer, 1997). Emotional intelligence has four dimensions which are (i) self awareness of emotions, (ii) self management of emotions, (iii) social competencies and (iv) social skills (Petrides and Furnham, 2000). The people having high self monitoring ability/skills create better image by using social cues as compare to individual with low self monitoring skills as well as individual with high self monitoring are able to understand others behavior as well (Graziano and Bryant, 1998). Emotion researchers also examined the role of emotional skills in social dealings and interpersonal relationships. Most of the researches identified that social skills are necessary for leaders of executive level; as individuals lead the organizational hierarchy, social intelligence becomes an increasingly significant determinant of who will and will not be successful (Hooijberg et al., 1997; Zaccaro, 2001). Possessing emotional and social skills was also associated with higher value social relationships and more supportive social support systems (Riggio et al., 1993). Moreover, lack of emotional skill leads to low levels of social and emotional competence that can break down the organization (Perez and Riggio, 2003; Philippot et al., 2003) 1.1 Knowledge gap According to Rozell and Gunderson’s (2003) work, it is a matter of fact that impression management is associated with valuable and positive outcomes in an organization where there are number of awkward situations occurring daily. In Pakistan the concept of impression along with emotional intelligence is not under observation in many organizations and none of the researcher conducted any study on relationship of EQ and