Abstract
School leaders have the difficult task of overcoming “challenges and implement the change” (Issah, 2018:1), which requires them to have social and emotional skills and competencies. The purpose of this quantitative research was to investigate the perceptions of teachers about the mediating role of emotional intelligence (EI) by school leadership in utilizing transformational leadership (TL) behaviours toward creating professional learning communities (PLCs). A structured online questionnaire was used to achieve this aim. Stratified convenience sampling was used in this research because some participants were willing and available to participate. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze, summarize, and describe the numerical data gathered (Conner & Johnson, 2017:52) to establish the relationship between EI, TL, and the creation of PLCs. This research found that EI significantly impacts the constructs of TL and PLC. It also found that schools are more involved with the performance of individual teachers and not with teachers sharing ideas and coaching and mentoring others. These findings support the notion of the present teacher merit awards as merit is usually associated with learners' academic performance, and merit awards are given to individual teachers and not to teams of teachers. Therefore, school leadership needs to be made aware of the associations between EI, TL, and PLC, as they are directly proportional to one another and impact one another both directly and indirectly when EI acts as a mediating variable.