Antecedents of Emotional Intelligence: Perceived Organizational Support Impact on Ambidextrous Behavior of Standalone Business School Faculty

: The present study was designed to examine the signiﬁcance of emotional intelligence (EI), perceived organizational support (POS), and its impact on organizational ambidexterity of faculty members working with standalone business schools in southern India. The study argues that the moderating effect of emotional intelligence (EI) is signiﬁcant in the association between perceived organizational support and two antecedents of organizational ambidexterity of faculty members. The research on institutional exploration and exploitation ambidexterity variants highlights vital ways to realize organizational ambidexterity. Very few researchers have investigated organizational ambidexterity in the higher education sector, and no research is available on standalone business school faculty members. The study proposes a novel research framework, and the ﬁndings reveal that perceived organizational support is highly inﬂuencing two antecedents of organizational ambidexterity. The research also observes a slight moderating effect of emotional intelligence between the association of perceived organizational support and organizational ambidexterity and the positive relationship identiﬁed among emotional intelligence, perceived organizational support and organizational ambidexterity.


Introduction
The major goal of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 is to guarantee that all people have access to high-quality education and that lifelong learning opportunities are available to them. India has the third largest higher education system after the United States of America and China [1]. India's education strategy is based on the belief that great education is the cornerstone for improving the lives of 1.3 billion residents [2,3]. The New Education Policy of India looks to meet the changing elements of the populace's requirements, in terms of quality education, modernization and research, with the goal of transforming India into an information superpower by providing its learners with pertinent cleverness and knowledge. There is a clear emphasis on improving the quality of educational outcomes, both at the policy and programmatic levels [4,5]. There are 10,725 standalone institutions in India, of which the private sector accounts for 75 percent [6].
There have been numerous significant improvements in the international educational climate. Over the past decade, in particular, there has been increased support for information technology, developments in educational infrastructure, curriculum design advances,

Organizational Ambidexterity
In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, there is a dire need to manage the organizational ambidexterity by the employees at the workplace to cope with the change [18][19][20]. Ambidexterity is defined as "an organization's ability to be aligned and efficient in its management of today's business demands while simultaneously being adaptive to changes in the environment" [21][22][23]. The ambidextrous behavior of an employee is related to their ability to identify the change in the organization, driving the employee to give high cooperation and making the employee ready for exploring new opportunities in the organization. The employee identifies possible potential sceneries and holds multiple roles at the workplace [20,24,25]. To promote the ambidexterity of the organization, top management has to make joint decisions along with employees; ensure good sharing of information, teamwork, and collaboration; and manage employee behavior, which drives change in the organization [20,26,27]. Some researchers note that ambidexterity promotes innovation [24,28].
The ambidextrous organization adapts successfully to the changing environment by finding new uses for existing abilities and investigating new opportunities for innovation and high organizational performances [24,29]. Hence, the ambidextrous organization utilizes the efficiency and innovative strategic capabilities of the organization. Ambidextrous human capital is explained as the behavior, skills, ability and knowledge of the employee that make them participate in exploratory and exploitative activities in the organization. Notably, such activities are different from the traditional human capital approach [26,30,31]. Apart from the environmental factors that affect organization ambidexterity, other factors include managerial or leader's support, recruitment and training, shared vision, appropriate coordination, decentralized structure and top management initiatives [22,32,33].
There is limited literature on the relationship between organizational ambidexterity, perceived organizational support, and the moderating effect of emotional intelligence, specifically in relation to the higher education sector. The present study is designed to examine the management of ambidexterity among business school faculty. The study examines the impact of business school faculty's emotional intelligence and their perception on contextual ambidexterity, structural ambidexterity and perceived organizational support. In the study, standalone business schools are considered to be organizations. The achievement of a business depends on its ability to explore new competencies while exploiting the current skills of employees [22,34]. Organizational ambidexterity antecedents are classified into two categories: conceptual ambidexterity and structural ambidexterity [22,35]. Contextual ambidexterity focuses on the behavior of employees and management. A coherence or cohesiveness is needed to manage the alignment and adaptability to the changing environment, and contextual ambidexterity can be practiced in a single business unit [32]. Structural ambidexterity regards designing different structures of activities for different departments, teams, or units [36] to meet the changes in the environment. Both types of organizational ambidexterity can be exercised simultaneously in an organization [22,36].

Perceived Organizational Support (POS)
According to Eisenberg's organizational support concept, if employees receive three perceived positive behaviors from the organization, such as fairness, supervisor support, organizational rewards and employment conditions, this will improve the perception of organizational support [37,38]. Organizational support applies to addressing people's emotional, social and economic needs. It entails multiple mentoring programs, such as counseling, education and guidance for individual retention, and enhances a friendly working atmosphere [11,39]. The fairness in the forms used to do so concerns procedural justice and determining the distribution among employees of resources [37,38]. Carelessness towards evenhandedness forecasts negative effects within the organization [38]. Formal policies and guidelines are implicated in the structural determinants of policies relating to employee-affected decisions, including appropriate notice before the implementation of decisions, receipt of correct information and speech. Social dimensions of procedural fairness are also referred to as interactional justice trials, which require a standard of interpersonal care in resource distribution [37,38,40]. Supervisors serve as agents of the organization, evaluating subordinate's performance and directing them appropriately and in line with the organization's goals [35,37,40]. Furthermore, employees believe that supervisors' assessments of subordinates are frequently communicated to top management, contributing to employees' relationships with their supervisors in line with POS [37,40]. Notified employee contributions as human resource practices are always positively related to POS [26,36,40].
Fairness may include support among peer groups, management characteristics, procedural fairness, employee turnover reduction, the versatility of supervisors, organizational diversity, and equity in promotion opportunities. If faculty perceive the treatment of the organization to be fair, they may take more responsibility for performance and transformation according to the needs of the organization [40][41][42][43]. Enriched superior-subordinate support acts as an emotional provision to all employees. This provision can be reinforced through mentoring, coaching and directing [43][44][45]. Organizational rewards and working conditions boost faculty performance. Retaining the challenge, adopting transformation, and achieving job satisfaction through the reward system of the organization reinforce the relationship between employee and organization [11,19,20,38]. Perceived organizational support can assist faculty to control unenthusiastic emotions efficiently and alleviate emotional tension in order to respond optimistically to disagreement events in terms of emotional management [38,44,45].

Emotional Intelligence
The capability to distinguish, comprehend and apply emotional information about oneself in order to achieve or cause effective or better quality individual performance is defined as emotional intelligence [46]. Employees who constantly display behavior communicated as EI characteristics, namely, emotional self-awareness, emotional selfcontrol and adaptability by drawing on emotional knowledge, are said to have emotional intelligence [17,47]. High EI employees should be able to build, expand and administer optimistic connections with others. Strong working relationships should lead to good connections with the organization itself [15,16,48]. Emotional intelligence is a vital part of correlating and moderating the performance of employees [19,42].
The ambidexterity of employees implies the presence within the organization of information exchange and cross-sector cooperation. Many pieces of research have revealed that deprived coordination between superior and subordinate, the poor performance phenomenon and a lack of contact among employees also occur in higher [1,49,50]. The exclusion of emotional bias among employees is an essential qualification for business schools to accomplish organizational ambidexterity. In business schools, it is very common to transform according to corporate needs [13]. In organizational emotion research, organizational features are the primary variables that influence human behavior. With the expression of personal emotion, faculty can influence a variety and complexity of organizational tasks [19,26,51]. In business schools, a significant approach to achieving organizational ambidexterity is faculty ambidexterity. The emotions of faculty directly affect their supervisory and relative care with the emotional intelligence of the faculty [31,32,42,49].
From the above literature review, a gap is identified in regard to examining organizational ambidexterity in terms of the impact of EI and POS, particularly in relation to business schools, and it is represented in Figure 1.

Materials and Methods
The study examines the effect of faculty emotional intelligence (EI) and their perception on perceived organizational support (POS). Few studies interpreted that a strong association exists between emotional intelligence (EI) and perceived organizational support (POS) in various industries and sectors [26,36]. The behavior that comprises EI competencies assists employees in engaging in self-regulation and developing self-awareness to facilitate effective relationships with others. As understanding and managing oneself constitute the concept of EI and perceived organizational support concerns regarding the role of oneself in relation to one's role as an organizational member, the authors hypothesize that emotional intelligence (EI) will aid in the association of oneself to organizational ambidexterity [52].

Research Design
The study was designed to examine the association between perceived organizational support and faculty ambidexterity and the moderating impact of emotional intelligence. According to organizational support theory, there are three dimensions to organizational support, namely, fairness, superior-subordinate relationship, and organizational rewards and working conditions. The research aimed to examine the three-dimensional relationship with the two-dimensional exploration activities and exploitation activities, together with consideration of faculty ambidexterity. The study examined the influence of individual levels of emotional intelligence on the correlation between POS and organizational ambidexterity.

Hypothesis 2.
Perceived organizational support (POS) is positively associated with organizational ambidexterity.

Hypothesis 4.
Emotional intelligence (EI) moderates the relationship between perceived organizational support (POS) and organizational ambidexterity (OA). OA is higher when EI and POS are high.

Materials and Methods
The study examines the effect of faculty emotional intelligence (EI) and their perception on perceived organizational support (POS). Few studies interpreted that a strong association exists between emotional intelligence (EI) and perceived organizational support (POS) in various industries and sectors [26,36]. The behavior that comprises EI competencies assists employees in engaging in self-regulation and developing self-awareness to facilitate effective relationships with others. As understanding and managing oneself constitute the concept of EI and perceived organizational support concerns regarding the role of oneself in relation to one's role as an organizational member, the authors hypothesize that emotional intelligence (EI) will aid in the association of oneself to organizational ambidexterity [52].

Research Design
The study was designed to examine the association between perceived organizational support and faculty ambidexterity and the moderating impact of emotional intelligence. According to organizational support theory, there are three dimensions to organizational support, namely, fairness, superior-subordinate relationship, and organizational rewards and working conditions. The research aimed to examine the three-dimensional relationship with the two-dimensional exploration activities and exploitation activities, together with consideration of faculty ambidexterity. The study examined the influence of individual levels of emotional intelligence on the correlation between POS and organizational ambidexterity.

Sampling Design
The study is focused on faculty members who are imparting business education in standalone business schools. The research is on standalone private business school faculty in the southern states (Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka), as Kerala retains the top position in SDGs and is in the second position in SDG 4, Quality Education [1][2][3]6]. This study uses a stratified random sampling method, as the strata are professors who have five years of association with that business school. To strengthen the conceptual framework, the study preferred business schools with ten years of association in the higher education market.

Measures
EQ analysis is a skill-based evaluation that uses Daniel Goleman's four-factor taxonomy derived by Bradberry and Su. EI, according to Goleman, has four components: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management [53]. The EQ assessment has 28 items and is performance-based; it is used to evaluate behavior that is associated with EI capabilities. The exam yields an overall EQ score as well as individual EI factor scores. Cronbach alpha dependability values of 0.85 to 0.91 were discovered in research conducted by The Emotional Intelligence Appraisal [49,53].
In 1986, A 36-item survey of perceived organizational support (SPOS) [37] developed by Eisenberger et al. divided perceived organizational support into fairness, superiorsubordinate support, and organizational rewards and working conditions.
The organizational ambidexterity questionnaire was adopted from Atuahene-Gima, K [28,54]. This questionnaire divides organizational ambidexterity into exploration and exploitation stages and measures the institution's last three years' progress using a fivepoint Likert scale for sustainable institutional operations and strategy.

Participants and Procedures
The investigation comprised two sections. The first part included demographic questions (for example, gender and age) and job information (for example, work experience, association with the current institution, designation, and salary). The second section consisted of questionnaires on EI, POS, and organizational ambidexterity. The survey questionnaire was distributed to 500 participants, from which 482 surveys were retrieved after omitting those with missing values and other mistakes. The total response rate is 96.4%. Finally, the 482 responses were considered for analysis. The mean sample age was 42.5 years, and the SD is 10.0; where male age is 41.5, SD is 9.0; and where female age is 37.5, SD is 9.0. The sample was dominated by female respondents, who accounted for 61.4%, while males accounted for 38.6%.

Results
The developed models were tested using SPSS PROCESS Macro, developed and widely used as Hayes PROCESS macro analysis. Robust approaches were used to account for the ordinal character of the variables involved [55]. In those studies, that included the variable of ambidexterity-the CFA of the ambidexterity scale and Models 1, and 3-the unweighted least squares (ULSs) approach was used to account for deviations due to non-normally allocated variables. It was essential because neither the normality nor the kurtosis standards had been met. This method has proven to be one of the most reliable ways for estimating models with ordinal variables that do not meet normality constraints [56,57]. The CFA of the perceived organizational support and EI scales, as well as Model 2, included variables (contextual and structural ambidexterity) that did not significantly differ from normality conditions-the robust maximum likelihood (RML) methodology was employed [56,58]. The relationship among Emotional Intelligence, Perceiver Organizational support, Organizational Ambidexterity (Exploration activities and Exploitation activities) Variables is represented in Table 1. The above table shows that positive relationship between the variables preferred for the study, i.e., emotional intelligence, perceived organizational support and organizational ambidexterity. The data are substantially skewed.
The study used both EFA and CFA, because this scale has never been tested before [56,58,59]. The above Spearman's rank correlation coefficients are based on the dummy-coded variables [59]. It is observed that there is a good relationship among all the variables EI, POS and OA. In the dependent variable, organizational ambidexterity is correlated with emotional intelligence and perceived organizational support. All model results are shown in Table 2. When estimating complex process models, the original SPSS algorithm has significant drawbacks. As a result, the study used the PROCESS macro, a powerful computational tool that allows multiple process models to be comprehensively computed. Model 5 calculates a mediation model with one variable that moderates the association between an explanatory and a mediator.
The moderation analysis showed significant interaction among perceived organizational support and organizational ambidexterity with the effect of emotional intelligence. The values are as β = 0.06, p = 0.041, CI at 95% (0.005, 0.156).
The above table only interprets the values of the successful model, which explores the variance between the relationship between POs and OA with the moderation of EI. The remaining three models did not show any significant influence. The following table also interprets the mediation of gender, which shows that the gender of the respondent does not have a significant impact.
As the PROCESS macro is not like SEM Program; it does not examine the measures of model fit. In contrast, it works on models developed from multiple correlations. Therefore, the PROCESS macro depends on the regression coefficients and is a standard way of testing indirect effects on dependent variables and represented in Table 3.  Table 3 shows that EI has a medium moderating effect on the relationship between POS and OA.
The following table shows that the mediation path is significant because p < 0.05. In the above table, coefficients are explained as unstandardized regression coefficients. LLCI and ULCI: limits of a CI for b based on a normality assumption. The paths interpreted the results, and they show that EI slightly moderates the path between POS and OA, as shown in Table 4. Conditional effect of the focal predator at the value of the moderator is shown in Table 5.
From the above tables, the independent variable (IV) POS, the dependent variable (DV) OA and the moderating variable EI provide the results, as the effects of the predictor are not significant at any of the two values of the moderator. A multiple regression model was tested to examine whether the association between perceived organizational support and organizational ambidexterity depends on the level of emotional intelligence of the employee. The above results indicated that the variable accounted for 16% of the variance in organizational ambidexterity, where R 2 is 0.1568 at a p-value of 0.000. Based on the outcome of the study, it is observed that perceived organizational support is strongly associated with organizational ambidexterity, whereas emotional intelligence moderation slightly impacts organizational ambidexterity, and the same is represented in Table 2.

Discussions
The demographic profiles of respondents are given in the analysis section. It is observed that there is not much difference in the levels of emotional intelligence between males and females, which contrasts slightly with the results from the earlier research [50]. In the case of perceived organizational support, males perceive high levels of support from the organizations, whereas female respondents have a slight difference in their opinions regarding POS [38,41]. As the respondents are mostly experienced faculty members with long-standing in business schools, they feel that institutions are responsible for initiating the ambidextrous behavior of their employees.
The primary aims of this study were to investigate the direct and indirect relationships among EI, perceived organizational support and organizational ambidexterity, and determine whether EI modifies the triadic association among perceived organizational support (POS), organizational ambidexterity (OA) and EI. In terms of the first goal, the PROCESS macro enabled us to estimate a process model with a single mediator. The findings revealed that EI was directly and completely associated with perceived organizational support and organizational ambidexterity, which proved hypothesis 4. The findings of the present research are reinforced by earlier research that suggests that EI can be a positive predictor of these psychological constructs [14,22,29,46].
In terms of the first goal, Model 4 of the PROCESS macro enabled us to estimate a process model with several mediators at the same time. The findings revealed that EI was linked to perceived organizational support and organizational ambidexterity directly and favorably [17,36,38]. Emotional intelligence, for example, is an essential personal aspect in organizational success and productivity by academics [60,61]. While POS interacts with ambidexterity, ambidexterity is positively related to POS [62]. The present research also discovered that emotional intelligence has a role in regulating the relationship between the two organizational supports and the ambidexterity of standalone business school faculty. Several researchers have investigated the impact of social support on emotional intelligence and discovered that perceived social support is linked to emotional intelligence. The impact of perceived organizational support on emotional intelligence is explored in this study [29,41,42,46].
The business schools have to split their attention and resources between exploitation and exploration to make the environment and people ambidextrous, wherein exploitation initiates efficiency, choice, execution and refinement, and exploration refers to research, appraisal and innovation, which is proven by the analysis [22,25]. This study reveals empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that the ambidextrous behavior of faculty members is highly supported when they have high emotional intelligence and receiving a high level of perceived organizational support.
Faculty members with high emotional intelligence are considerably better at perceiving organizational support than are those with low emotional intelligence. Organizational support has a great impact. In this paper, the stimulus-emotion-behavior psychological mechanism is employed to the relationship between organizational support and management ambidexterity [40,[63][64][65]. Organizational features influence emotional intelligence growth, and emotional intelligence positively affects a faculty's ambidexterity [66][67][68]. Due to the expectations from industry, parents and students, many business schools are facing greater inner stress and outer risk; hence, emotional intelligence is an elementary competence that business school faculty essentially possess [60,61]. High EI, in contrast to low EI, will make instructors more adaptable to managerial and environmental modifications. Faculty with higher emotional intelligence (EI) are more adept at using their specific emotional motivations and management of emotions to collaborate with associates, as well as maximizing inside and outside resources to play various roles in various situations, such as trainers, content deliverers, and mentor [19]. Hence, the hypothesis is proven.
The study examines how organizational ambidexterity exists in standalone business schools, as they have to meet the expectations of the industry. Every year, institutions foresee the requirements of the industry, and the same is reflected on faculty members. In total, 70% of faculty reported high perceived organizational support [8,40]. The institutions maintain fairness and transparency, which supports POS to a high degree. Emotional intelligence has a moderate association with POS and organizational ambidexterity [1,38]. It is observed that high and moderate levels of emotional intelligence are associated with high organizational support. When EI moderates the association between POS and OA, it represents a slight moderating effect.

Conclusions
For the faculty working in autonomous business schools, EI may be a valuable personal resource [66] that can help them believe in perceived organizational support and organizational ambidexterity, not just directly but also indirectly. Additionally, EI may have a role in strengthening the positive association between perceived organizational support and organizational ambidexterity, which boosts employee trustworthiness and improves performance [67]. As a result, treatments aimed at boosting EI could effectively foster ambidexterity in business school professors.
Organizational support, according to the theory of social exchange, will help individuals to develop higher organizational commitment, which will subsequently affect the complexity and diversity of individual and organizational behavior. Previous research has identified several characteristics that influence managerial ambidexterity, including managerial decision-making authority, access to internal information, and cross-sector collaboration. Emotional intelligence has an impact on more than only the expression and recognition of emotions [4]. More importantly, it has an emotional regulation and management role, which has a considerable impact on faculty ambidexterity. Emotional regulation allows individuals to show appropriate emotion in response to work features and changes in the environment.
The primary focus of the research is on testing the relationship between individual levels of emotional intelligence and the faculty's perceived levels of organizational support. The relationship between these two factors is strongly related to the influence of some variables, such as organizational engagement, shared vision, and work engagement [17,36,66,68]. This research primarily focused on the relationship between emotional intelligence and perceived organizational support influencing the ambidextrous behavior of faculty members working in standalone business schools. During the pandemic, a considerable number of changes have taken place in many service sectors. Teaching is no exception among these, and it has a philanthropic reason [3,5]. Good human resource practices must also be used to enhance the ambidexterity of organization [53,69]. As a result, further research must observe something more akin to contextual ambidexterity, in which individuals navigate the social dimensions involved in both exploration and exploitation simultaneously [69]. This is especially true for teachers involved in both regular and excellence education [1,11].
Various studies have focused on emotional intelligence and perceived organizational support, but studies focusing on the perspective of ambidextrous behavior and organizational ambidexterity are very scarce [69]. This research indicates that ambidexterity in higher education in the Indian context is not yet completely inferred. Further implications for practice and future research can be extended by developing a model to examine how contextual and structural ambidexterity influence business schools, wherein this requires practical orientation in pedagogy and curriculum as per the industry requirement [6,22,51]. The study is limited to the exploration of ambidexterity using exploitation and exploration activities in standalone business schools only. Several innovations made in the field of higher education can be examined through structural ambidexterity. The exploratory function is supported by the organizational structure [69].
Author Contributions: All of the authors contributed to conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, and writing and editing of the original draft. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.