The Effect Mechanism Of Hotel Frontline Employees’ Emotional Intelligence On Job Satisfaction

Although number of hotel human resource managers recognized the importance of emotional management, but few hotels to take effective measures to manage the employees’ emotional labor behavior and improve employees’ job satisfaction. This research focused on the frontline staff of China hotel industry, discussed the impact of emotional intelligence on job satisfaction and what mechanisms exist between the two variables. It has great significance to the service organization management implications.Based on the conservation of resource theory, the emotional intelligence as the independent variable, the surface acting and the deep acting as the mediator variable, the job satisfaction as the dependent variable, the perceived organizational support as the moderator, to construct the conceptual model of the emotional intelligence on the job satisfaction. Questionnaires were distributed by 7 hotels to 340 frontline employees working at different departments of the hotels and 279 questionnaires were analyzed. The main conclusions: Emotional Intelligence has a positive impact on job satisfaction; surface acting isn’t a mediator between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction; deep acting was found partial mediate the positive relationship between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction; and perceived organizational support moderate the negative relation between surface acting and job satisfaction and the positive relationship between emotional intelligence and deep acting and the positive relationship between deep acting and job satisfaction. The above findings revealed the mechanism relationship between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction.The innovation: first, the perceived organizational support as the moderator variable to broaden the perspective of emotional intelligence research. Second, the study on the relationship between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction by the moderated mediating model has great significance to interpret the interaction mechanism between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction. Third, the study focused on labor-intensive and customer service-oriented hotel industry, with the hotel front-line staff as a research object, can help hotels to gain insight into the psychological mechanism of front-line staffs’ emotional intelligence.