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Emotional intelligence and service quality: a meta-analysis with initial evidence on cross-cultural factors and future research directions

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Abstract

In an increasingly competitive market economy, retailers are seeking ways to manage customer perceptions of their service quality. Selecting employees who are high on emotional intelligence (EI), and training employees in emotional competencies, may be ways to improve service quality. This meta-analysis tests the claims that EI improves service quality. The findings indicate that EI is significantly and positively related to service quality and that this relationship is stronger (1) for cultures that are short (versus long) term oriented and that are indulgent (versus restrained), and (2) for professional services and service shops than for mass services. The EI–service quality relationship does not differ between cultures that are masculine versus feminine and high versus low in uncertainty avoidance.

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Notes

  1. Descriptions of Hofstede’s cultural framework and justifications for using Hofstede’s cultural framework are provided in the supplementary materials.

  2. We performed publication bias analyses to assess the robustness of our meta-analytic results. The results of these analyses demonstrated that publication bias may not be present in our meta-analytic distributions, supporting the robustness of our results. Details of these analyses are reported in the supplementary materials.

  3. Results for all hypotheses are summarized in Table S1 in the supplementary materials.

  4. Although we had 14 samples from a variety of countries in the distribution of restraint cultures, only 3 samples were from indulgent cultures; in fact, all three of these samples came from Ghana. Hence, we acknowledge that this cross-cultural finding is preliminary and should be interpreted with caution.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Marketing, Franklin P. Perdue School of Business, Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD, 21801, USA

    Chao Miao

  2. Department of Marketing, College of Business, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, 40292, USA

    Michael J. Barone

  3. Department of Management, College of Business and Economics, Towson University, Towson, MD, 21252, USA

    Shanshan Qian

  4. Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YX, UK

    Ronald H. Humphrey

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  1. Chao Miao
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Correspondence to Chao Miao.

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Miao, C., Barone, M.J., Qian, S. et al. Emotional intelligence and service quality: a meta-analysis with initial evidence on cross-cultural factors and future research directions. Mark Lett 30, 335–347 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-019-09495-7

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