ability. In addition, educational programs should be developed to
improve emotional intelligence. At the organizational level, working
environments should encourage the emotional intelligence of
employees.
5.3. Limitations and future research
Several limitations of the study need to be addressed. First, the
present study tested the hypothesized relationships using a sample
of food and beverage employees in the Korean hotel industry.
However, the use of convenience sampling can introduce unknown
systematic and variable errors. The hotels selected as study subjects
therefore cannot be judged to be representative of all hospitality
industries. The questionnaires used to measure emotional intelligence
used content that had previously been applied to a general
company, not to a hotel industry. Thus, it may be unreasonable
to generalize these results to the entire hospitality industry. In
addition, since CWBs represent negative role outcomes, efforts
were made to maximize the anonymity of respondents; however,
the respondents’ tendencies toward defensive responses to the
measurement questions could not be excluded and therefore may
be a limiting factor. This study also did not consider sufficient
variables of individual differences that may influence emotional
intelligence at the individual level. Furthermore, employees’ tolerance
to emotional intelligence or degree of adaptation to their
current job should be taken into account in order to make the
proposed model more suitable. In addition, examining the moderating
effect of the causal relationship between employees’ general
traits would lead to more specific recommendations. Moreover,
further significant results from a managerial perspective would
be provided if subsequent studies developed an EI-EB model for
non-hotel industries and determined the differences between the
models for hotel and non-hotel industries through a comparative
analysis.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a grant from the Kyung Hee University
in 2011 (KHU-20110098).