Employee Emotional Competence: Construct Conceptualization and Validation of a Customer-Based Measure

Customers often experience intense emotions during service encounters. Their perceptions of how well contact employees demonstrate emotional competence in emotionally charged service encounters can affect their service evaluations and loyalty intentions. Previous studies examining employees’ potential to behave in emotionally competent ways (i.e., employee emotional intelligence [EEI]) have used self- or supervisor-reported scales to predict customer outcomes, presenting EEI as stable and independent of the context. However, service firms should be more concerned with the actual display of emotionally competent behaviors by employees (employee emotional competence [EEC]), because employee behaviors vary across encounters. Moreover, a customer perspective of EEC is useful as customer perceptions of employee performance are crucial predictors of satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, this study proposes a conceptualization and operationalization of EEC in a service encounter context. On the basis of a comprehensive literature review and in-depth interviews, the authors develop a scale to capture customer-perceived EEC, defined as an employee’s competence in perceiving, understanding, and regulating customer emotions during a discrete service encounter. The scale achieves good reliability and validity. Researchers can use it to explore the role of EEC in service contexts; managers can employ the scale to diagnose EEC and improve customers’ service encounter experiences.