Background: Healthcare professionals especially nurses suffer from stress due to the characteristics of their work and environment of the hospital.  Disparity of emotions is a voyage to face the stress that has an effect on work outcomes.  So emotional intelligence (EI) plays a vital role in balancing the emotions and has a control on stress. 

Objectives: The objective of the paper is to study EI and stress conceptually and to investigate the relationship between EI and stress among the nurses in healthcare sector.

Methods: The study has been conducted in five hospitals of Guntur District in A.P.  The sample size is 187 respondents and simple random sampling method is used to collect the data.  The researcher has used two interview schedules i.e. EI and Workplace Stress. The schedules contain six subscales three from each, under which five items were included in each subscale.  The reliability test Cronbach's Alpha, Correlation Coefficient and Linear Regression Analysis were computed in SPSS.

Findings, Results & Discussions: Findings reveal that there is an imbalance of EI among the nurses that leads to stress at workplace. The result shows that the nurses who scored less in overall scores have less in clarity of emotions and experience increase of stress.  There is a strong, positive correlation between EI and stress, which is statistically significant (r =.922, n= 187, p=0.000<.0005) for all the variables.  There is statistically significant (p=0.000<0.05) between EI and stress in the regression model where p value is less than 0.05 indicating that overall, the regression model is statistically significant predicts the increase of stress at workplace in nurses. The implications of the study are the nurses should not under-utilize or over-utilize the emotions.  The nurses should have awareness of balance and usefulness in their emotions to have a healthy feeling.  Proper training helps them to improve EI and resilience to protect themselves from the emotional imbalance when dealing with their core aspect of the work. 

KEYWORDS: Emotional Intelligence, Disparity, Healthcare Sector, Workplace Stress, and Nurses