How and When Does Front-Line Employees’ Emotional Intelligence Facilitate Their Service Creativity? A Cross-Level Contingency Approach

Emotional intelligence has attracted much scholarly attention owing to its positive effect on various service outcomes. Yet, the linkage between emotional intelligence and employees’ service creativity is not well understood. Drawing upon prior research on employees’ attitude toward change and service-oriented human resource management (HRM) practices, we aim to investigate how and when emotional intelligence contributes to employees’ service creativity. In particular, we predict that employees’ emotional intelligence is positively related to their service creativity, and this effect is mediated by their attitude toward change. Furthermore, we hypothesize that a firm’s service-oriented HRM practices strengthen the positive effects of emotional intelligence on employees’ service creativity via their attitude toward change. We randomly selected 295 front-line employees from 36 four- and five-star hotels in China to examine our hypotheses. Results based on multilevel analyses provided support to our predictions. This study connects emotional intelligence and employees’ service creativity research streams and provides a novel moderated mediation mechanism to shed light on such a relationship in the hospitality context.