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The important effect of employee's

emotion management ability on his/her
service behaviour in the international
tourist hotel
a
Chien-Wen Tsai
a
Department of Hotel Management , Ming-Hsin University of
Science and Technology , No.1, Sinsing Road, Sinfong Township,
Hsinchu County, 304, Taiwan, Republic of China
Published online: 22 Oct 2009.

To cite this article: Chien-Wen Tsai (2009) The important effect of employee's emotion
management ability on his/her service behaviour in the international tourist hotel, The Service
Industries Journal, 29:10, 1437-1449, DOI: 10.1080/02642060903026262

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 The Service Industries Journal
Vol. 29, No. 10, October 2009, 1437–1449

The important effect of employee’s emotion management ability on

his/her service behaviour in the international tourist hotel
Chien-Wen Tsai

Department of Hotel Management, Ming-Hsin University of Science and Technology, No.1, Sinsing
Road, Sinfong Township, Hsinchu County 304, Taiwan, Republic of China
Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 23:49 27 December 2014

(Received 2 May 2009; final version received 3 May 2009)

The main purpose of this study is to clarify the relationship between the employee’s
emotion management and service behaviour by analysing employees in the international
tourist hotel, which involves high degrees of emotional labour that is more complex
than in other industries. According to the empirical evidence, the ability of self-
emotional appraisal and other’s emotional appraisal become the important factors for
in-role cooperative service behaviour and extra-role service behaviour. The practices
can regard emotion management as the hint to predict applicant’s future service
behaviour, and take it as a tool to choose staff with good service performance.

Keywords: emotion management; service behaviour; international tourist hotel;

human resource management; marketing strategy

Introduction
Swan and Bowers (1998), Winsted (2000), and Liljander and Mattsson (2002) all emphasize
the importance of customer satisfaction with employee service behaviour. In particular,
Podsakoff and MacKenzie (1994) and Hoffman and Kelley (1994) place extra-role customer
service at a greater level of importance. Due to the fact that there is a proven relationship
between employee cooperativeness and service quality (Hoffman & Kelley, 1994;
Parasuraman, Berry, & Zeithaml, 1990), we can understand the importance of whether
employees have demonstrated and supplied the customer service demanded by customers.
Interaction between customers and employees will result in certain emotions being
felt, and this emotional impression determines whether a customer stays or leaves. There-
fore, corporations strive to provide consumers with colourful, positive, and memorable
feelings for every consumption experience, i.e. the ‘emotional value’ of customers
(Barlow & Maul, 2000). As such, managers are increasingly emphasizing the importance
of speech and behaviour between customers and employees, and are gradually guiding and
controlling employee behaviour in front of other individuals (Hochschild, 1983), in order
to express the atmosphere that corporations desire, so that there will be increased customer
satisfaction. Thus, ‘emotional performance’ became a standard in measuring employee
work performance (Morris & Feldman, 1996).
Many studies in the service industries reveal that emotional management will directly
affect employees’ work performance (Adelmann, 1989; Morris & Feldman, 1997). Inter-
national tourist hotels provide services to consumers that are high in emotional labour
(Hochschild, 1983), and, to employees who provide high-level emotional service, they


Email: jean10822@must.edu.tw

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# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/02642060903026262
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 1438 C.-W. Tsai

need to continuously adjust their emotions during their interaction with customers when
they perform emotional labour, and also devote greater efforts to control and manage
their inner emotions. As work content becomes more and more complex, how well individ-
uals can manage their own and other people’s emotions becomes more and more important.
To employees who provide high levels of emotional labour, do their emotional man-
agement abilities affect their service behaviour? There is not much relevant discussion on
this subject in the literature, so this study will use employees who have high customer
contact and high emotional labour in the hotel industry as an example, and explore
whether there is a relationship between emotional management and service behaviour,
to remedy the existing gap in this field in current academic discourse. In practice, it can
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also provide hotel industry employers with relevant advice.

Literature review and hypothesis

Emotional management
Hochschild (1983) defines and divides the labour in the organization as cognitive labour,
physical labour, and emotional labour. Warhurst, Nickson, Witz, and Cullen (2000a,
2000b) suggest aesthetic labour, which is defined as a supply of embodied capacities
and attributes possessed by workers at the point of entry into employment. Quinn
(2008) finds that aesthetic labour is strongly supported by the use of emotional labour
as the worker needs to have a certain empathy with the customer. Then, some researchers
started to notice the ‘soft’ skills of new workers in hospitality industries.
Strongman (1987) pointed out that emotions consist of interactions between a set of
complex objective and subjective factors, and they can result in behaviours which are
usually (but not always) expressive, goal-oriented, and adaptive. Meanwhile, Goleman
(1995) believes that the term emotion refers to feelings and specific behavioural tendencies
contingent to specific cognitive, psychological, physiological, and other related situations.
Lazarus (1991) defines emotional management as when facing a crisis and having a negative
emotion, the method the individual adopts for cognition and behaviour adjustment to main-
tain the harmony of body and mind, and reduces the uncomfortable feelings. Emotion man-
agement means understanding the situation, and handling the situation effectively
(Weisinger, 1998). Emotional management abilities are also called emotional intelligence,
which represents how well an individual can appropriately manage their own emotion.
Mayer and Salovey (1997) proposed that emotional intelligence should include: the ability
to accurately detect, assess, and express emotions; stimulate and produce emotions that
will improve cognitive abilities; possessing of emotional knowledge and ability to under-
stand emotions; adjusting emotions to increase emotional and intelligence development,
and other eclectic abilities, and also include four primary dimensions: (1) self-emotional
appraisal; (2) other’s emotional appraisal; (3) regulation of emotion; and (4) use of emotion.
The term ‘emotional labour’ was suggested by Hochschild (1983). These kinds of
labour providers need to show the specific emotion which organizations request in the
product selling or the process of providing service. Emotional labour is produced by organ-
izations, so emotion providers need to follow the requests by organizations to show their
emotion (e.g. Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). Hence, different work roles might demand to
show different emotions even when he/she is in the same position but faces different cus-
tomers (Sutton & Rafaeli, 1988). Thus, it presents a kind of role behaviour and personal
efforts in public (Putnam & Mumby, 1993). When high emotional-labour employees
find that they have strong internal empathic abilities, they will be better able to recognize
internal work problems and their sources, and as such, when facing discrepancies between
 The Service Industries Journal 1439

organizational expectations and actual performance of personally executed work, they will
be better able to adjust themselves to meet organizational expectations.
When employees become proficient in detecting other people’s feelings, they are better
able to anticipate, verify, and satisfy customers’ needs, and provide appropriate service and
assistance in the interaction process (Goleman, 1998). When high emotional-labour employ-
ees possess better emotional stability and emotional management abilities, they can put
emotional disturbances and urges under control, and maintain calmness and demonstrate
positive emotions when interacting with customers (Goleman, 1998; Kenneth & Wong,
2000), thus exhibiting emotional routines demanded by the organization, to avoid non-
professional emotions appearing within professional jurisdictions (Chen, 1998). Higher
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finesse in applied use of emotions can allow employees to view pressure and incidents
under different perspectives, and solve surrounding problems while maintaining emotional
stability, thus improving work performance (Yu, 2000). Salover and Mayer (1997) believe
that each emotional intelligence dimension interacts and is dependent on the other, and
that each dimension has its own contribution to work performance. Gross (1998) discovered
that emotional intelligence has positive impacts on work performance and attitude.
Based on the definition of emotional labour and the degree of emotional service,
Hochschild (1983) raises six kinds of 12 standard professional community occupation
types in the USA which need to provide emotional service in the majority of their
work. Adelmann (1989) subdivides those occupations, and the emotional-labour study
takes these as the criteria. The following researchers demonstrate similar discoveries
that the job characteristics may affect the relationships of emotional labour with other
task performance variables (Erickson, 1991; Morris & Feldman, 1996, 1997; Wharton,
1993). Hackman and Oldham (1975) proposed the job characteristics model based on
Turner and Lawrence’s (1965) necessary work attributes theory, and also devised the
job diagnostic survey, believing that there are differences between individuals, and that
when facing the same job characteristics, different psychological situations and behaviour-
al responses may result. They also systematized and simplified the relationship between
job characteristics and personal responses to work, proposing the five core dimensions
of skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback, which analyse
how job characteristics stimulate important personal psychological states during work,
including sentiments about the meaning of work, experiences of responsibility on work
results, and understandings of actual work results, which will further affect employees’
work motivation, work performance, and work satisfaction (Hackman & Lawler, 1971).
Morris and Feldman (1996) believe that job characteristics are one of the factors affect-
ing stress in employees’ emotional labour. Task significance can affect employees’ work
attitude, causing them to participate more actively, and improve their work capacity
(Darden, Hampton, & How, 1989; Fleischer & Jones, 1993; Sims & Szilagyi, 1976). There-
fore, job characteristics will affect employees’ feelings about work, and also affect individ-
ual attitudes and behavioural response (Hackman & Oldham, 1975). However, Shaw’s
(1980) research shows that job characteristics will not directly affect the employees them-
selves, but rather, changes the objective job characteristics into recognized (subjective)
job characteristics that affect employees’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour. According to
the above literature, job characteristics may affect relationships between these variables.
Based upon past literatures, Kong and Baum (2006) develop a picture of the skills pro-
files, work background, educational attainment, attitudes, and plans of the employees, and
they find that front office work is a challenging and demanding area of work and oral com-
munication is identified as the most important skill. Campbell et al. (1998) suggest that the
personality traits of sociability/friendliness, drive, honesty/integrity, conscientiousness,
 1440 C.-W. Tsai

and adaptability, discovered, are more important than technical skills as criteria in the
selection of service workers in the hotel industry (Warhurst et al., 2000a, 2000b). Warhurst
and Nickson (2007) suggest that analysis of labour has tended to focus on employee atti-
tudes, framed through emotional labour. Such analysis is just partial. These literatures
noted above point out a new direction which remains unexplored to expand theory on
human resource management.

Service behaviour
Service behaviour requires two attributes: service quality and work quality. Service quality
refers to the effects that service behaviour has on the customer’s experience of the com-
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pletion of service. Work quality refers to the characteristics demonstrated by service

behaviour for productive activities such as work efficiency, the effects of work content
on employees’ psyche, etc. (Chen, 2004). Kelley, Hoffman, and Kavis (1997) discovered
that if customers realize that employees’ service behaviour is customer-oriented, they will
have a better opinion of the quality of service, and this can also avoid behaviours that cause
customers to be dissatisfied (Dunlap, Michael, & Terry, 1988). Lance and Stephen (1997)
defines ‘customer-oriented service behaviour’ as services that employees provide to make
customers happy, and they categorized such behaviours as ‘role-prescribed service behav-
iour’, ‘extra-role service behaviour’, and ‘cooperativeness’. Responses to customer assess-
ments and emotional interactions with customers are vital in employee behaviour (Dube &
Menon, 1998).
Employees with a high-level service contact need of necessity to be face-to-face with
customers, and their primary rewards are professional satisfaction. The higher their pro-
fessional satisfaction, the more motivated the employees are in providing service
(Chandon, Leo, & Philippe, 1997; Seashore & Taber, 1975). In recent years, much com-
mercial literature emphasizes the importance of the notion that employees should provide
‘unexpected care’, ‘active service’, and other extra-role customer service to impress cus-
tomers so that customers will experience significantly positive and satisfactory emotional
response (Bitner, Booms, & Stanfield Tetreaut, 1990). When two individuals start interact-
ing, the resultant feelings and impressions can determine whether a customer stays or
leaves (Barlow & Maul, 2000). Therefore, employees’ emotional management abilities
can increase or decrease customers’ ‘emotional value’.
From the above evidence, we can postulate that the better the emotional management
abilities of tourist hotel employees, who are expected to perform high levels of emotional
labour, the more inclined they will be to demonstrate service behaviour that satisfies the
expectations of employers and customers. These premises lead to our first hypothesis:
H1: There is a positive correlation between service behaviour and emotional management
abilities.
Employees are an important factor in determining corporate service quality and
business success or failure (Heskett, 1987; Tansuhajm, Randall, & McCullough, 1988;
Tsai & Chung, 2006). The work content of international tourist hotels’ employees is to
provide groups of people with service-based professional work, and so human resources
are the most important resource in the industry. In practice, a human being’s performance
is very unstable, especially in the international tourist hotel industry, which is high in
emotional labour. Service behaviours in this industry are the result of interactions
between employees in many different departments, and customers (Tsaur & Lin, 2004).
Different employees with different levels of ability of emotion management need to com-
plete check-in, dining, room service, and other services that are high in emotional value
 The Service Industries Journal 1441

during the service delivery routines. When the service process includes broader varieties
of tasks, employees exhibit broader varieties of emotions (Hackman & Oldham, 1975).
And when employees are under greater demand to interact with customers in a face-to-
face fashion, they become more likely to lose control of their emotions. When employees
can determine their own behaviours, if corporate emotional regulations conflict with
employees’ actual feelings, employees become more likely to violate the corporation’s
emotional regulations (Morris & Feldman, 1996).
By analysing the international tourist hotel industry, which involves high degrees
of emotional labour that is more complex than other industries, we can further clarify the
relationship between employees’ personal emotional management and service behaviour.
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Methodology
The reason this research chose the hotel industry as the research subject is the specific
industry characteristic where the whole service process needs to be performed by team-
work which is so different from many other service industries. Colleagues need to
support each other while customers stay in the hotel, and which is exactly the cooperation
dimension in the service behaviour variable. Then, this characteristic will obviously high-
light the problem which this research would like to solve – to clarify the relationship
between employee’s emotional management and service behaviour. This study’s target
population consists of five-star international tourist hotels, as certified by the Tourism
Bureau, in the regions of Taiwan. This study randomly selected 20 international tourist
hotels’ employees (i.e. ones that have first-line contact with customers), and mailed out
1000 questionnaires. This research adapts the analytical approach to discuss the relation-
ship of these two variables of emotional management and service behaviour. According to
the extant literature, it is shown that job characteristics may have a moderating effect. In
the research design, to avoid the effect of job characteristics, this research only chooses the
high-contact staff who work in the food and beverage department, front office, and sales
department as the research subjects.
The content of food and beverage department staffs’ job includes leading guests to the
table, helping guests order food, serving food, cleaning the table, and other customers’ tem-
porary demands and so on, which mainly lies in completing the customer’s dining period in
the hotel. The content of front office department staff’s job include welcoming guests,
guiding directions, taking baggage, helping guest check in, check out, settling accounts,
answering questions, and other customers’ temporary demands and so on, which mainly
lies in completing the customer’s staying period in the hotel. The content of the sale’s
department staff’s job include guiding guests and showing the environment (rooms, restau-
rants, conference rooms, and banquets) of the hotel, as well as following the manager’s
instructions to carry out marketing promotion or activities and so on. The above duties
all need high-contact consumers. The questionnaires returned numbered 437, resulting in
a questionnaire return rate of 43.7%. Omitting 17 uncompleted and voided questionnaires,
there are 424 effective questionnaires, resulting in an effective return rate of 42.4%.

Measurement of employees’ emotional management

This study uses the emotional intelligence dimensions of Salover and Mayer (1997) and
Kenneth and Wong (2000), which consists of five questions in self-emotional appraisal,
four questions in other’s emotional appraisal, four questions in regulation of emotion,
and four questions in use of emotion as measurement tools. Higher scores indicate
better emotional management abilities of the respondent.
 1442 C.-W. Tsai

Measurement of service behaviours

This study uses the customer-oriented service behaviour scale developed by Lance and
Stephen (1997) to measure the service behaviour of international tourist hotel employees.
We also consulted expert opinions and adjusted the original scale for it to be appropriate
for the industrial characteristics of international tourist hotels, in order to ensure content
validity of the scale. Analysis of dimensions is separated into three questions for in-role
service behaviour, three questions for extra-role service behaviour, and five questions
for dealing with others.

Basic personal data

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Sex, age, educational level, tourism-related education, marital status, department, job,
yearly earnings in the international tourist hotel, job experience in different departments,
work experience in different departments, previous jobs, and monthly wage are included,
for a total of 12 questions.

Reliability and validity

This study’s reliability verification of each dimension uses the Cronbach a coefficient and
item to total correlation to evaluate internal uniformity and inspect concentration level
between variables. After omitting some items, reliability score for emotional management
is 0.75 – 0.90 and 0.80– 0.91 for service behaviour. These are considered acceptable
reliability scores.
This study employs factor analysis to ensure that the scales have construct validity. We
used the primary factory analysis and largest variation axis methods to extract the content
of the primary factors. The KMO value for emotional management is 0.88, 0.92 for service
behaviour. After omitting items with low correlation and lower than 0.5 in the absolute
value of their load, or two factors greater than 0.5 under the same question, we have interp-
olated the following factors whose characteristics values are greater than 1: emotional
management – 6.36 for awareness of personal emotions, 2.07 for emotional adjustments,
1.45 for others’ emotional appraisal, 1.04 for use of emotions, and explanatory variations
are, respectively, 39.76%, 12.95%, 9.07%, and 6.49%, and accumulated explanatory vari-
ation is 68.27%; service behaviour (combined into two dimensions) – 5.77 for in-role
service behaviour, and 1.12 for extra-role service behaviour, and explanatory variations
are, respectively, 52.49% and 10.18%, and accumulated explanatory variation is 62.68%.

Results
Basic information analysis
Participants are primarily female (63.9% of the sample population); the largest age group is
20– 39 (72.4% of the sample population); the most common education level is completion
of university degrees (46.7% of the sample population); 52.4% graduated from depart-
ments related to tourism; there tend to be more singles (80.9% of the sample population);
in terms of departments, cafeteria employees are most common (46.7% of the sample popu-
lation), customer service department employees (40.6% of the sample population); base-
level employees (base-level service personnel or administrative assistants) are most
common (72.4% of the sample population); in terms of total yearly earnings in hotel ser-
vices, those who serve 1 year are most common (20.1% of the sample population), second
most common are those who serve 2 years (11.4% of sample); in terms of monthly wages,
those earning $20000 – $29000 are most common (54.2% of the sample).
 The Service Industries Journal 1443

Table 1. Pearson correlation analysis of emotional management and service behaviour.

Variable Emotional management Service behaviour
Emotional management
Pearson correlation 1
Service behaviour
Pearson correlation 0.672 1

P , 0.01, with significant correlation (two tailed).
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The correlation coefficients for emotional management and service behaviour exhibit
significant positive correlation, which confirms a relationship between these factors, as
demonstrated in Table 1.

Relationship between emotional management and service behaviour

There is significant positive correlation in the effects of emotional management – personal
emotional awareness on in-role cooperative service behaviour (b ¼ 0.258, P , 0.01) and
extra-role service behaviour (b ¼ 0.232, P , 0.01). There is significant positive corre-
lation in the effects of other’s emotional appraisal on in-role cooperative service behaviour
(b ¼ 0.199, P , 0.01) and extra-role service behaviour (b ¼ 0.169, P , 0.01). There is
significant positive correlation in the effects of regulation of emotions to extra-role service
behaviour (b ¼ 0.209, P , 0.01). There is significant positive correlation in the effects of
use of emotions on in-role cooperative service behaviour (b ¼ 0.300, P , 0.01). Parts of
the results support H1. Please refer to Table 2.

Conclusions and suggestions

Conclusions
Service behaviour emphasizes the qualities and contents of the interactions between the pro-
viders and the customers (Tsaur, Chang, & Wu, 2004). Therefore, the behaviour of service
personnel occupies a very important position in the whole service process (Yang, 2001), so
international tourist hotel employees who have to perform high levels of emotional labour

Table 2. Regression analysis of emotional management and service behaviour.

Service behaviour
In-role cooperative Extra-role service
service behaviour behaviour
Emotional management b t b t
Self-emotional appraisal 0.258 5.735 0.232 4.596
Other’s emotional appraisal 0.199 4.358 0.169 3.295
Regulation of emotions 0.073 1.529 0.209 3.914
Use of emotions 0.300 5.777 0.091 1.558
F 83.243 44.621
R2 0.443 0.299
Adjusted R2 0.438 0.293

P , 0.01, with significant correlation (two tailed).
 1444 C.-W. Tsai

need to improve their interpersonal relationship and communication skills. Solomon, Sur-
prenant, Czepiel, and Gutman (1985) found that the service behaviour of employees with
higher emotional intelligence tends to not miss corporate or customer expectations
because of being under different emotional states. Chen’s (1998), Yu’s (2000), and Sun’s
(2002) research found that emotional intelligence has better explanatory power in predicting
the work performance of workers providing high emotional labour: high emotional-labour
workers tend to be more able in detecting customers’ needs, more earnest in their service
attitude towards customers, and in work, tend to be more able to cooperate with co-
workers and managers, actively help co-workers, and accomplish tasks not related to them-
selves. Results from this study also support the above findings.
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There are several important conclusions from the empirical evidence of this research:
(1) Because of the industrial characteristics of international tourist hotels, the service
targets of employees performing high emotional labour are ‘people’. Appropriate
responses for different consumer demands often need to be made immediately,
and, as such, it needs employees to have the ability to accurately detect, assess,
and express emotions to predict, confirm and satisfy the needs of customers and
then, provide appropriate service and assistance during their service interaction
(Goleman, 1998). So, the ability of self-emotional appraisal and other’s emotional
appraisal become the important factors for in-role cooperative service behaviour
and extra-role service behaviour.
(2) When customers bring up extra concerns and needs, and the service content is out
of the job description, employees need to possess better emotional stability and
emotional management abilities. They can put emotional disturbances and urges
under control, and maintain calmness and demonstrate positive emotions when
interacting with customers (Goleman, 1998; Kenneth & Wong, 2000), and then,
they need the ability to regulate emotions. The ability to regulate emotions
becomes the important factor for extra-role service behaviour.
(3) The management activities of the hotel industry combine collective labour, and in
order for this collective labour to proceed smoothly, adequate cooperation between
employees will be required to complete the service routine for the same customer.
These job contents conform to employee’s job descriptions and employees can
stimulate and produce emotions that will improve cognitive abilities; possessing
of emotional knowledge and ability to understand emotions; adjusting emotions
to increase emotional and intelligence development, and other eclectic abilities
to raise their performance towards in-role cooperative service behaviour by the
ability to use emotion.
This empirical evidence further highlights the significance of the industry’s emotional
management abilities.

Suggestions
In practice – human resource management
Modern society has entered an era of emotional consumerism, and only hotels that can
truly satisfy its customers can stand out among the heavy market competition. The
hotel entrepreneur chooses the right employee through the select function of human
resources management to achieve the enterprise’s ultimate objective – good service
quality. In the interactive process of service, employees’ emotions will be transmitted
to, and exert a temporary effect on, the customers through their interactions with the
 The Service Industries Journal 1445

customers in question (Solomon, Surprenant, Czepiel, & Gutman, 1985). According to the
empirical evidence of this research, the employee’s emotional management ability affects
his/her service behaviour. Emotional management can be an important requirement for
selecting hotel employees. Emotional management has become an essential asset in
today’s professions, and appropriate emotional education will be helpful in improving
emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995; Ryback, 1998). Emotional intelligence is differ-
ent from the intelligence quotient. After puberty the intelligence quotient changes for very
few, but emotional intelligence does not. Emotional intelligence not only develops in the
early years, but mostly continues its development by way of study and experience of life’s
accumulation (Goleman, 1998). Thus, the human resource department can make a plan for
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every basic HR practice for the organization to improve an employee’s emotional manage-
ment, such as selection requirement, entrance training, and teaching materials of on-the-
job training for managers, the career planning, the achievements appraisal project and
the criterion revision, the staff assists plan and so on. Then, ensure customers feel
caring sentiments through the ‘emotional sales’ demonstrated by employers, and convey
service value and establish customer loyalty, to increase the overall competitiveness of
the industry. Besides, there a few hoteliers who make emotion rules or specifications expli-
cit in job descriptions. This research suggests hoteliers need to redesign jobs to give
employees good direction towards better service quality.

In practice – marketing management

There are two kinds of services that can be considered best: one is, providing routine ser-
vices based on in-role cooperative service behaviour, where service personnel focus on
courtesy, care, thoughtfulness, and professional discipline; the other is, emotional
service based on extra-role service behaviour, where service personnel provide a mix of
quick, colourful, and skilful service behaviour that is genuine, natural, and passionate.
If the entrepreneur can unify the human resources management function, much rests on
consumer demand; the human resource function schedules the organization emotion
rule and the standard explicitly, it can promote the staff’s emotion management capacity,
and staff will create the wonderful happy ‘true moment’ with customers.
When the staff can carry out the emotion service work correctly according to the rules
the hotel entrepreneur requests, it will provide the service, namely conform to the hotel
entrepreneur’s ‘product strategy’, then, the hotel shapes its product image and promotes
the enterprise’s competitive power. The international tourist hotel industry provides cus-
tomers with high degrees of service and facilities with comfort and grace. Employers who
want to maintain a desirable quality of service need to pay particular attention to the
emotional management and service behaviour of employees who attend to customers on
behalf of a given hotel.

In academics – emotional management

Modern people live in an era full of stress, and emotional management has become an
important topic. There is considerable and comprehensive research in the relevant
topics of emotional theory in psychology and sociology, but in the field of management,
the introduction, application, and management of employees’ emotions still face many
problems, which need to be adequately explained or verified, for example, the effects of
emotional management in groups, human resources management, fusion of sales manage-
ment functions and emotional management abilities, etc.
 1446 C.-W. Tsai

Besides, according to the literature, job characteristics might affect the relationship
between emotional labour and work performance. International tourist hotels provide an
integrated functions service. In order to purify the correlation between high-contact
employees’ emotional management and service behaviour, this research chooses employ-
ees in F & B, front office and sale departments where their job characteristics are closely
similar to this research’s subjects. The rest of the employees who have different job
characteristics from the three types still need to be researched in order to analyse the cor-
relation between an employee’s emotional management and service behaviour. Because of
the complicated industry characteristics, the hotel industry will be a benchmark to research
how job characteristics affect the original two variables.
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Based upon past literature, Kong and Baum (2006) develop a picture of the skills pro-
files, work background, educational attainment, attitudes and plans of the employees, and
they find that front office work is a challenging and demanding area of work and oral com-
munication is identified as the most important skill. Campbell, William, Lauri, Logan, and
Gina (1998) suggest that the personality traits of sociability/friendliness, drive, honesty/
integrity, conscientiousness and adaptability, discovered, are more important than techni-
cal skills as criteria in the selection of service workers in the hotel industry (Warhurst
et al., 2000a, 2000b). Warhurst and Nickson (2007) suggest that analysis of labour has
tended to focus on employee attitudes, framed through emotional labour. Such analysis
is just partial and the previously mentioned literature points out a new direction which
remains unexplored to expand the theory on human resource management.

In academics – service behaviour

Schneider and Bowen (1985) suggest that many customers assess the quality of service
based on employees’ behaviour, and so employee behaviour has started attracting attention
for the last 10 years or so. Causal mechanisms of this variable still merit exploration.
Future research can also be extended to the perspectives of managers, employees, and cus-
tomers. Future researches could use a system approach to clarify the cause and effect of
these variables to expand the original marketing theory.

Acknowledgements
This work described in this paper was partially supported by a grant from the National
Science Council in Taiwan (Project No. 94-2815-C-159-006-H).

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Appendix 1. Research questionnaire

Emotion management:

(1) I comprehend the reasons of being happy or unhappy.

(2) I comprehend my changes in emotions.
(3) I comprehend my true feeling.
(4) I always comprehend if I am happy.
(5) I always comprehend my friend’s emotions from their behaviour and language.
(6) I have a good ability on observing other’s emotions.
(7) I am sensitive towards other’s feelings and emotions.
(8) I comprehend other’s emotions very well.
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(9) I concentrate on achieving my goal.

(10) I always tell myself that I can do things well.
(11) I control my temper very well.
(12) I always encourage myself to do the best.
(13) I encourage myself to work hard in unfavourable situations.
(14) I set objectives and work hard towards them.
(15) I calm down faster than others from angry feeling.
(16) I control my emotion very well.

Service behaviour:
(1) I perform all those tasks for customers that are required of him/ her.
(2) I help customers with those things which are required of him/ her.
(3) I fulfil responsibilities to customers as specified in the teller job description.
(4) I voluntarily assist customers even if it means going beyond job requirements.
(5) I often go above and beyond the call of duty when serving customers.
(6) I willingly go out of my way to make a customer satisfied.
(7) I help other employees who have heavy workloads.
(8) I am always ready to lend a helping hand to those employees around me.
(9) I help orient new employees even though it is not required.
(10) I voluntarily give of my time to help other employees.
(11) I willingly help others who have work-related problems.