I know how you feel, but it does not always help: Integrating emotion recognition, agreeableness, and cognitive ability in a compensatory model of service performance
Abstract
Purpose
Previous research has demonstrated the importance of emotion recognition ability in negotiations and leadership, but scant research has investigated the role of emotion recognition ability in service contexts. The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a compensatory model in which service employees’ emotion recognition ability helps enhance their job performance, particularly when employees score low on the agreeableness personality dimension or have low cognitive ability.
Design/methodology/approach
With a two-wave multisource dataset collected from a service center of a large retail bank, multiple regression analysis was used to test the moderating roles of agreeableness and cognitive ability on the relationship between service employees’ emotion recognition ability and their performance.
Findings
Service employees’ emotion recognition ability helped enhance their job performance. However, the positive effect of emotion recognition ability on job performance was only statistically significant when employees’ agreeableness or cognitive ability was low.
Practical implications
The findings have important implications for how service organizations select and recruit employees. In particular, service employees with low agreeableness or cognitive ability may still be able to perform well when possessing high emotion recognition ability. Therefore, emotion recognition ability should be considered in the selection and recruitment process.
Originality/value
Going beyond self-report measures of emotion recognition and using a performance measure from organizational records, this study is one of the first to examine how emotion recognition ability interacts with personality and cognitive ability in predicting service employees’ effectiveness in a service organization.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the retail bank that provided access, data and financial support for this research project, as well as the Wharton Financial Institutions Center for its support.
Citation
Doucet, L., Shao, B., Wang, L. and Oldham, G.R. (2016), "I know how you feel, but it does not always help: Integrating emotion recognition, agreeableness, and cognitive ability in a compensatory model of service performance", Journal of Service Management, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 320-338. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-11-2014-0307
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited