Nedeljković Knežević, Milena, Petrović, Marko D., Kovačić, Sanja, Mijatov, Maja, Vuković, Darko B. and Kennell, James ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7877-7843 (2020) Acting the part: Emotional intelligence and job satisfaction as predictors of emotional labor in travel agencies. Tourism and Hospitality Research, 21 (2). pp. 183-201. ISSN 1467-3584 (Print), 1742-9692 (Online) (doi:10.1177/1467358420965653)

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Abstract

Employees of retail travel agencies in sales roles have direct contact with tourists, which, in the case of poor customer service, can be extremely negative for businesses. Because of this, it is important to understand how employees manage their emotions in a way that can help them to remain satisfied with their work and avoid burnout. However, job satisfaction, emotional intelligence and emotional labor have not previously been studied in one model in the field of tourism and hospitality. Herein the mediating role of emotional intelligence in the relationship between job satisfaction and emotional labor in travel agencies is analysed, as well as job satisfaction as an antecedent of emotional labor in this sector. Data were collected from 160 employees of 45 travel agencies in the Serbian cities of Belgrade and Novi Sad. The results show that employee’s emotional intelligence mediates the positive relationship between job satisfaction and emotional labor. Increasing employees’ emotional intelligence through training and development and actively recruiting employees with high emotional intelligence will reduce emotional exhaustion and improve customer satisfaction for retail travel agencies.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Uncontrolled Keywords:	emotional intelligence, job satisfaction, emotional labor, tourism industry
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GV Recreation Leisure
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Business Faculty of Business > Department of Marketing, Events & Tourism Faculty of Business > Tourism Research Centre
Last Modified:	28 Jul 2021 08:01
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/30035

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