Excellent teachers produce quality students who resembles their teachers. Teaching is a very challenging and stressful job that create emotional distress for teachers and have a significant impact on students. Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory of Motivation inspired this study, which focused on Emotional Intelligence. This study attempts to measure the influences of Bangladeshi teachers’ emotional intelligence (EI) on students’ motivation for academic learning. This research incorporates Daniel Goleman’s five EI dimensions: self-awareness (SA), self-regulation (SR), self-motivation (SM), empathy (EM) and social skills (SS). The survey includes students of 14 private and 14 public universities from Bangladesh. A 31-item structured questionnaire survey was designed to collect data from (N = 415) respondents using a five-point Likert scale, and structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to measure the reliability, validity, and test of hypotheses. Results revealed that students’ motivation for academic learning is directly influenced by teachers’ emotional self-awareness (SA), self-regulation (SR), self-motivation (SM), empathy (EM) and social skills (SS). The study’s findings indicate that students’ motivation for academic learning is positively influenced by teachers’ emotional intelligence. Consequently, this study contributes to the body of knowledge on emotional intelligence by offering implications for teachers in higher education.