Affective hospitality: A new framework for applying ability emotional intelligence to hospitality

Extensive research shows that hospitality workers’ emotional intelligence (EI) impacts key work outcomes, including performance and satisfaction. However, the underlying emotional skills remain poorly understood because scholars have primarily studied emotion-related hospitality competencies in isolation, rarely examining the mechanisms that could link and explain them. In the present article, we introduce a new framework called “Affective Hospitality” to provide an integrated and systematic approach to emotional skills in hospitality based on the Four-domain model of ability EI. Specifically, we discuss how the EI abilities to perceive, use, understand, and manage emotions may be the underlying skills that enable critical emotion-related competencies in hospitality, namely service delivery , conforming to display rules, employing emotional labor , as well as workers’ customer-orientation , resilience, and co-creation of emotional value . Through this new framework, we propose new lines of research in hospitality that emerge directly from this integrated approach. For example, researchers could investigate specific emotional skills covered by ability EI theory, such as emotional sensitivity to explain adaptive service delivery or interpersonal emotion regulation to better understand value co-creation.