The Professional Counselor | Volume 12, Issue 3 243 successful CSCP implementation and related resources on subsequent self-efficacy. As such, not only can school counseling coursework infuse the ASCA National Model Implementation Guide: Manage & Assess (ASCA, 2019b) and the Making DATA Work: An ASCA National Model publication (ASCA, 2018) along with additional emotional intelligence and transformational leadership resources, school counseling faculty and supervisors should intentionally incorporate school counseling students’ ongoing exposure to practicing school counselors and supervisors with high scores of emotional intelligence and transformational leadership. Limitations As with all research, the results of this study need to be understood in consideration of the methodological strengths and limitations. Despite obtaining a large national sample, the data collection procedures used in this study prevented our ability to determine the survey response rate. As such, we are unable to make any claim about non-response bias and it is possible that school counselors who declined to participate significantly differed from those who completed the study. Relatedly, the sample included a proportionately large number of participants who started the survey but did not finish. It is possible that the attrition of these school counselors reflected an as of yet unidentified confounding construct that is also related to the variables under study (Balkin & Kleist, 2016). Our sample is nonetheless generally representative of the national school counselor demographic data reported in the recent state of the profession survey of approximately 7,000 school counselors (ASCA, 2021), strengthening the validity and subsequent generalizability of our results. Another limitation of our study is that all data were cross-sectional and non-experimental. The correlation and mediation analyses used in the study demonstrate the strength of associations between the examined constructs, and do not reflect temporal or causal relationships. The cross-sectional design does not allow statistical control for the predictor and outcome variables; thus, it may not accurately specify the effect of the predictor on the mediator (Maxwell & Cole, 2007). Therefore, any inclination to impose intuitive logic or imbue directionality that emotional intelligence is an antecedent to either transformational leadership or CSCP implementation should be interpreted with caution. Further, all data from this study were collected at the same time and relied upon self-report. As such, commonmethod variance could have inflated the identified relationships between the constructs. An important consideration is that this study was delineated to focus on illustrating individual path coefficients between emotional intelligence, leadership, and CSCP implementation and provides limited insight into understanding of complex relationships among latent variables. Likewise, we used Hayes’s PROCESS to examine our mediation model which features procedure rather than overall model fit created through more sophisticated statistical analyses such as structural equation modeling (SEM). Given that PROCESS is a modeling tool that relies on OLS regression, it may be biased in estimating effects without taking into consideration measurement error (Darlington & Hayes, 2017). Suggestions for Future Research The results of this study have numerous implications for future research. Future studies may explore the relationship between emotional intelligence and other forms of leadership prevalent in the counseling literature, such as charismatic democratic or servant leadership (Hilts, Peters, et al., 2022). In addition, because self-report emotional intelligence measures have been described as better to assess intrapersonal processes and ability emotional intelligence measures have been shown to be related to emotion-focused coping and work performance (Miao et al., 2017a, 2017b), future research may consider incorporating ability and mixed emotional intelligence measurements to examine a causal model of emotional intelligence and transformational leadership (or other forms of leadership).
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