Towards an understanding of the culturally intelligent behaviour of hotel service employees

Abstract

In a highly complex and culturally diverse hospitality context, service employees are expected to perform high levels of culturally acceptable behaviour to culturally different guests, both verbal and non-verbal, during times of service interaction to boost guest satisfaction. Unarguably, cultural intelligence (CQ) is pivotal to both service employees and hospitality organisations. Nevertheless, there has been no empirical study of CQ conducted in the hospitality industry. The present study aims to investigate the performance and behaviour of hotel service employees’ CQ by employing a 14-item Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) in a questionnaire survey. A total of 719 valid responses from 10 hotels in Hong Kong were collected. The results suggest that the hotel service employees generally possess CQ in all four dimensions, namely metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioural, which enables them to appropriately interact with hotel guests from different cultural backgrounds even though their cognitive CQ scored lower than the overall CQ. Furthermore, the specific CQ behaviours of the hotel employees in each dimension were scrutinised. In view of the importance of CQ in the hospitality industry, hospitality practitioners are duty-bound to nurture and develop the CQ of their service employees in the hope of attaining guest satisfaction in cross-cultural service encounters.