| Author: | Lam, Chin Wah |
| Title: | Cultural intelligence in the hospitality industry : its influence on emotional labour and job satisfaction of frontline service employees in Hong Kong |
| Advisors: | Cheung, Catherine (SHTM) |
| Degree: | DHTM |
| Year: | 2018 |
| Subject: | Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations Hotels -- China -- Hong Kong -- Employees Hotels -- China -- Hong Kong -- Employees -- Job satisfaction Cultural intelligence Emotions |
| Department: | School of Hotel and Tourism Management |
| Pages: | ix, 151 pages : illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | In a highly complex and culturally diverse hospitality context, frontline service employees are expected to perform high level of emotional labour by demonstrating culturally acceptable emotional expressions and behaviours to culturally different guests, both verbal and non-verbal, in service interaction to attain guest satisfaction. Unarguably, cultural intelligence (CQ) and emotional labour are pivotal to both frontline service employees and hospitality organisations and they are predicted to be associated with job satisfaction. Nevertheless, no empirical study about CQ is hitherto conducted in the hospitality industry. The present study aims to investigate the influence of frontline hotel employees' CQ on their emotional labour and job satisfaction. The theoretical framework employs the construct of CQ, emotional labour and job satisfaction and attempts to examine the simultaneous structural relationship among these three constructs. Based on the theoretical framework, altogether 10 hypotheses are developed. This study adopts a quantitative research methodology. The target respondent was frontline hotel employees and questionnaire survey was conducted in both pilot study and the main survey using convenience sampling method. A total of 719 valid responses from 10 hotels in Hong Kong were collected and tested within the proposed structural model. The entire structural model demonstrates a good model fit with the data while highlighting the significant influence of CQ on emotional labour and job satisfaction. The results indicate that CQ has direct positive effect on emotive effort, expression of naturally felt emotions and job satisfaction but maintain a negative significant relationship with emotive dissonance. Significantly different from the majority of literatures regarding emotional labour, this study confirms expression of naturally felt emotions is the only emotional labour component that maintains a direct positive relationship with job satisfaction; simultaneously, emotive effort and emotive dissonance maintain a non-significant relationship with job satisfaction. Furthermore, both emotive dissonance and expression of naturally felt emotions are found to exert partial mediating effect on CQ-job satisfaction relationship. This empirical study is among the first to highlight the importance of CQ and its significant influence on emotional labour and job satisfaction as well as the positive significant relationship between expression of naturally felt emotions and job satisfaction in the hospitality industry. It deserves attention of academics to further examine CQ in future research and hospitality practitioners to nurture and develop employees' CQ in the organisation, manager, supervisor, and employee aspects, in the hope of evoking employees' expression of naturally felt emotions and properly respond to the highly interactive cross-cultural context in good faith. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 991022180957903411.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 1.32 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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