The impacts of cultural intelligence and emotional labor on the job satisfaction of luxury hotel employees

Abstract Within luxury hotels targeting multinational segments, frontline service staff are essential to creating unique, personalized experiences for high-value, discerning clientele. Performing emotional labor and utilizing cultural intelligence are key to ensuring exceptional cross-cultural service encounters, but which also create additional pressures for frontline staff. This study aims to assess the impacts of a comprehensive range of emotional labor and cultural intelligence (CQ) on employees’ job satisfaction. Cognitive CQ, motivational CQ, emotive dissonance, and expression of naturally felt emotions were shown to influence job satisfaction. Moreover, the study engaged senior executives from luxury hotels to further discuss the survey results. This approach helped the researchers and practitioners to (re)contextualize the study’s key findings, which were used to reflect on managers’ understanding of cultural intelligence, emotional labor and job satisfaction. The discussions highlighted how these issues were incorporated in luxury hotels’ human resource practices in general and especially during the COVID-19 crisis.