
Cognitive ability – the brain-based skills needed for learning, communicating, and decision-making – and agreeableness are considered to be important traits for an employee in the service industry. Being agreeable helps with the ‘human’ or relational aspect of the job, helps develop future relationships with customers, and helps find solutions to customers’ problems. But not everyone is naturally endowed with the famous “service with a smile”.
This is where emotional intelligence comes in. By using their emotion-recognition skills, employees with low levels of agreeableness or poor cognitive skills. can perform just as well as the rest.
So how can companies and organisations foster this capability?
How to recognize emotions and use Emotional Intelligence to boost service performance
Professor Lorna Doucet, School of Management Fudan University, shares research undertaken with fellow researchers Shao, Wang and Oldham to explore the beneficial use of emotional intelligence and how companies can use it to boost their employees’ service performance and foster customer trust and ultimately loyalty.
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How to recognize emotions and use Emotional Intelligence to boost service performance: The latest in an ongoing series of Council on Business & Society Research Pods. Condensed learning capsules inspired from internationally published research. Fields covered include CSR, management & leadership, HR, sustainable finance & reporting, social enterprise, entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and sustainable business practices.
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How to recognize emotions and use Emotional Intelligence to boost service performance. Download the CoBS Research Pod
Learning objective: Identify the benefits of cognitive ability and positive emotions on the service employee-customer relationship. Plan and implement a strategy for boosting employee service performance within your organisation.
Related research: Doucet, L., Shao, B., Wang, L. and Oldham, G. , 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, Volume 27.
- Go further and read the full article Recognising Emotions: A superpower in the service industry’s arsenal.
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The Council on Business & Society (The CoBS), visionary in its conception and purpose, was created in 2011, and is dedicated to promoting responsible leadership and tackling issues at the crossroads of business and society including sustainability, diversity, ethical leadership and the place responsible business has to play in contributing to the common good.
In 2020, member schools now number 7, all “Triple Crown” accredited AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA and leaders in their respective countries.
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- Keio Business School, Japan
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- Warwick Business School, United Kingdom.
