244 The Professional Counselor | Volume 12, Issue 3 Future research could extend the unit of analysis in this study (e.g., individual school counselor) and adopt a similar perspective to Lee and Wong (2019) to examine emotional intelligence in teams. Studies could similarly expand the use of self-report emotional intelligence measures and include ability or mixed emotional intelligence measurement. Relatedly, as Miao et al. (2017b) described significant moderator effects of emotional labor demands of jobs on the relationship between selfreport emotional intelligence and job satisfaction, future research could assess this in the school counseling context, wherein the emotional labor demands of the work may vary. Given the robust workforce literature grounding associations between emotional intelligence and job performance, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and resilience in the face of counterproductive behavior in the workplace (Hussein & Yesiltas, 2020), future school counseling research can examine emotional intelligence and other constructs, including ethical decision-making, belonging, attachment, burnout, and systemic factors. Lastly, as most constructs involved in school counseling practice are latent variables in nature, we recommend future scholars consider SEM when it comes to investigating overall model fit between the variables of interest. SEM offers more specification to the model including goodness of fit of the model to the data (Hayes et al., 2018). It minimizes bias involved in mediation effect estimation with consideration of individual indicators for each latent variable (Kline, 2016). Conclusion As an initial examination of the relationship between emotional intelligence and CSCP implementation, as well as the role of school counselors’ transformational leadership in mediating the relationship between emotional intelligence and CSCP implementation, this study was grounded in the empirical scholarship on leadership in both school counseling and allied fields. We found support for our hypothesized model of school counselors’ emotional intelligence and their CSCP implementation, mediated by their engagement in transformational leadership. Our examination yielded evidence in support of the significant mediating role of school counselors’ transformational leadership engagement on the relationship between emotional intelligence and CSCP implementation. In the meantime, our results supported the robust reliability of three instruments in our sample: the WEIP-S (Jordan & Lawrence, 2009), the SCTLI (Gibson et al., 2018), and the SCPIS-R (Clemens et al., 2010; Fye et al., 2020), which can be useful for future school counseling researchers and practitioners. This study serves as an important necessary step in establishing these relationships, and we anticipate that our results will ground further investigation related to school counselors’ emotional intelligence, leadership practices, and CSCP implementation, including the development of additional measurements. Conflict of Interest and Funding Disclosure This study was partially funded by Chi Sigma Iota International’s Excellence in Counseling Research Grants Program.
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