The impact of environmental stimuli on hotel service employees’ service sabotage—mediation role of emotional intelligence and emotional dissonance

Abstract

While scholarly inquiries into Service Sabotage (SS) have received ample attention in the literature of various industries, the role of Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Emotional Dissonance (ED) in employee-customer relations in the context of Environmental Stimuli (ES) in the tourism accommodation sector has remained unexplored. The role of employee–customer interaction in tourism is paramount for a hospitality organization’s growth, sustainability, and profitability. We hypothesized hotel service employees’ EI and ED can be influential factors to SS. Adopting the Mehrabian–Russell model (M–R) and Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework as conceptual paradigms, we tested the effect of hotel ambiance on employees’ emotions, which can have significant effects on SS. The study revealed that ES links to behaviors and elicits EI and ED as human emotional responses to environments that have a parallel mediating effect on mitigating or neutralizing the negative effect of SS in an organization. The findings provide important insights into an organization’s awareness of the provision of ES as a positive factor for employees, subsequently forming their behavioral consequences of EI and ED which can mitigate the negative impacts of SS. The study yields important implications on how hospitality organizations should pay attention to the impact of rule-breaking behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.