Published Paper Details:

PCEA and other churches experience conflicts due to diversity of opinion in deciding duties of the clergy, order of worship, allocation of mission funds and church participation in corporate social responsibilities. Emotional intelligence is expected to enable people to be in harmony with themselves and with other people. An emotionally intelligent person is supposed to be aware of self, self-regulate, motivated intrinsically, and empathetic and has social skills (Cherry, 2018). The current study's purpose was to establish a relationship between emotional intelligence and church conflict management among woman's guild leaders in the PCEA church Kiambu County, Kenya. The study objectives were be; to establish the prevalence of church conflict among woman's guild leaders in PCEA, to determine the relationship between self-awareness and church conflict management among WG leaders, to examine the relationship between social skills and church conflict management among WG leaders and establish the relationship between empathy and church conflict management among WG leaders. The study used correlational research design. Dependent variable indicators were: ability to communicate openly in case of dispute, active listening, reviewing options and win-win solutions. A sample of 220 woman's guild leaders who were selected from a target population of 415 PCEA Woman's guild leaders. Multistage sampling was used to sample the population. Self-administered questionnaires designed for WG leaders were used in the collection of quantitative data. Interview schedule was used to collect qualitative data from WG chairpersons. Each questionnaire was divided into sections A-E based on research objectives. The instruments' face, and content validity were achieved through expert advice. Internal consistency reliability was enhanced through pilot study involving 5WG leaders from Nairobi County whose results did not form part of the main study. The questionnaire had a Cronbach coefficient alpha 0.87 and the interview guide 0.74. Quantitative data was then analyzed by use of descriptive statistics namely mean, mode, percentage and frequency and inferential statistics were presented using tables guided by the Pearson correlation coefficient. Qualitative data was analyzed using content analysis which transformed qualitative data to quantitative based on study objectives which were then presented in terms of frequency and percentage. The study findings showed that Woman's Guild leaders' self awareness, was 3.31% of WG leaders had poorly developed self awareness, 4.97% WG leaders had developing self awareness, 17.13% had fairly developed self awareness while 2.76% had perfectly developed self awareness. Most WG leaders had well developed self awareness 71.83%. The total mean points were 3.66 which when rounded off to the nearest whole number which was 4. This leads to the conclusion that WG leaders on average have well developed self awareness. The study recommended that Church counselors needed to assimilate regular testing of Emotional Intelligence indicators such as Self Awareness when conducting their usual counselling sessions in order to avert church conflict. Permission to undertake this study was sought from Kenyatta University and others like, NACOSTI and Kiambu County local government. Findings obtained from this study will be useful in managing church conflicts among Woman's guild members through emotional intelligence training and interventions. The findings will be of significance to Presbyterian Church of East Africa in understanding relationship between emotional intelligence and church conflict management among her members. Academic documentation from the study will be used for reference by those interested in understanding EI and church conflict management.