Impact of Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Labor on Organizational Outcomes in Service Organizations:A Conceptual Model

Emotions in general, emotional intelligence and emotional labor in particular have occupied an important place in today’s organizations, especially in service organizations. Although the association of emotional intelligence with organizational outcomes, specifically employee job performance and customer satisfaction has been investigated by several researchers, the underlying mechanisms through which emotional intelligence influences organizational outcomes have not been investigated yet. This paper tries to address this void in the service management literature. This paper presents a conceptual model of the effect of emotional intelligence on organizational outcomes, namely job performance and customer satisfaction in service organizations, with emotional labor as the mediating variable. The proposed model assumes that emotional intelligence affects job performance of employees and customer satisfaction with service quality through its influence on emotional labor strategy used by employees in service encounters with customers. Implications of the study are mentioned. Major limitations of the study and directions for future research are discussed.