서비스제공자의 문화적 공감에 따른 회복탄력성과 심리적 소진이 고객지향성에 미치는 영향

Abstract

Recently, as the needs of consumer diversified and in the midst of fierce competition of the hotel industry, the value of human resources is recognized as a matter of importance in order to improve management efficiency and to increase the profit margin. Also, an individual competence, such as recognizing, analyzing and reacting to the characteristics of cross-cultural customers, is recognized as a matter of importance at the service encounter. However, the service providers of the hotel industry are exposed to negative situation such as irregular working hours, psychological pressure and the emotional burden that doesn't pertain one's own situation as the result of promoting customer satisfaction. These problem could lead to a negative service results, such as apathy, unkindness, loss of motivation and psychological burnout due to dissatisfaction growth and lack of efficiency and productivity. In this research, it aims to verify the relationship between the resilience and psychological burnout according to the cultural empathy on customer orientation in the interaction between cross-cultural customers. In addition, this research tried to establish positive customer oriented service results by validating the influential relationship among the moderating variable factors of emotional intelligence. In order to establish the purpose of this research, an empirical analysis was conducted by setting up a research model and collecting data from service providers of luxury hotel and resorts in Jeju. The purposes of this research are as follows. First, the composition factors and roles of service providers' cultural empathy will be established. Also, this research examined the relationship by expanding the factors of cultural empathy to resilience and psychological burnout in the interaction between cross-cultural customers Second, the relationship between the customer orientation and the resilience and psychological burnout of service providers will be studied. This proposes the direction of positive service result according to the service providers' individual psychological factors and emotional state. Third, the customer orientation will be proposed as the outcome of cultural empathy and the relationship of two variables will be examined. The relationship between cultural empathy and customer orientation will be examined because empathy is a main factor that results in positive customer service behavior in the interaction with customer. Fourth, an empirical analysis of the emotional intelligence of service provider as a moderating effect will be verified. It was examined how emotional intelligence of service provider can ease the relationship between customer orientation and resilience and psychological burnout. As the previous research about cultural empathy is insufficient, this research focused on the relationship between the emotional state of service provider and customer oriented behavior along with the factors of empathy in order to propose related implications from the marketing point of view. Therefore, they hypotheses were examined through literature review and empirical analysis for the proposed research purposes. The scope and the methods of this research are as follows. First, the importance and the conceptual definition of each variable of this research were proposed by reviewing the domestic and international literatures. Previous literatures about cultural empathy, resilience, psychological burnout, customer orientation and emotional intelligence were reviewed to consider the factors and relationship of each variables. Second, the data was collected from service providers who recognizes the cultural characteristics of cross-cultural customers and the ability to react in such situation is requested in the service encounter. A survey was conducted by 372 service providers who work at the luxury hotels and resorts in Jeju. Third, an empirical analysis examined the validity of the measuring instruments and the moderating effects among the variables. In order to secure the reliability, the survey items were based on the previous literatures and structural equation model was used as the statistical analysis technique. SPSS 18.0 and AMOS 20.0 were used as the analysis tool. The main results from this research are as follows. First, when the verification result of cultural empathy of service provider effecting positively on resilience was looked at, the cognitive empathy, one of the sub factor of cultural empathy, had a positive effect when the emotional empathy, the other sub factor of cultural empathy, didn't have any significant effect. Second, the cognitive empathy had a negative effect on psychological burnout when the emotional empathy didn't have any significant effect. Third, when the verification result of cultural empathy of service provider effecting positively on customer orientation was looked at, the cognitive empathy had positive effect when the emotional empathy didn't have any significant effect. Fourth, the resilience of service provider had a negative effect on psychological burnout. Fifth, the resilience of service provider had a positive effect on customer orientation. Sixth, the psychological burnout of service provider had a negative effect on customer orientation. Seventh, the sub factor of emotional intelligence had a partial moderating effect in the relationship between the sub factor of cultural empathy and resilience. Eighth, the sub factor of emotional intelligence had a partial moderating effect in the relationship between the sub factor of cultural empathy and psychological burnout. Finally, the sub factor of emotional intelligence had a partial moderating effect in the relationship between the resilience and psychological burnout. The theoretical implications from this research are as follows. First, this research empirically established the effect of the relationship between service providers' resilience and psychological burnout according to the cultural empathy on customer orientation. Most of the previous related research focused on establishing the effect relationship between the service providers and customer of a similar cultural background. However this research focused on establishing the effect relationship and customer orientation of the service providers of hotel industry that have a high frequency of contact with foreign customers at the service encounter. Along with this, the importance of cultural empathy was established and arranged an opportunity to promote an interest of cultural empathy by introducing the concept to marketing field. Second, this research found that cultural empathy and resilience have an effect on reducing the produced psychological burnout created by emotional labor of service providers with the interaction between the customers in repetitive service tasks. In other words, the service providers feel less psychologically burned out when they have a higher level of cognitive empathy and resilience than emotional empathy. It was also reemphasized that when service providers have a high level of resilience, they tend to be more reasonably service oriented at service encounter. Therefore, this research proposes the importance of a plan that would increase the cognitive empathy and the enhancement of resilience competence. Third, this research investigated the relationship of cultural empathy, resilience and psychological burnout as independent variables of customer orientation in order to identify and meet the customers needs in the interaction between service providers and customers. As a result, out of emotional empathy and cognitive empathy, which are the sub factors of cultural empathy, having higher cognitive empathy led to a better customer oriented behavior by understanding their needs. This research also proposes the importance of cognitive empathy because it means understanding customer is the precondition in order to promote customer orientation. Also, the results provides useful implication about the customer orientation relationship that the cognitive empathy of service providers effect the service quality. Fourth, this research investigated the moderating effects of emotional intelligence between the effect relationship of service providers' resilience and psychological burnout according to the cultural empathy on customer orientation. In this process, a significant difference was found according to the psychological change because the moderating effects of emotional intelligence were partially different in each path of the research model. This also establishes the mechanism of the psychological reaction, due to emotion of service providers, that leads to customer oriented behavior. This results shows the importance of cultural empathy and resilience, which are the independent variables, in the mechanism that forms customer oriented behavior and also the importance of emotional intelligence in the relationship of resilience and psychological burnout with the service providers' cultural empathy. The practical implications based on the above theoretical implications are as follows. First, exchange programs and training, to promote cultural empathy, are necessary in order to bring smooth interaction between the service providers and cross-cultural customers. These programs and training should include an experience with foreign languages, overseas training, cultural experience, which will help the service providers in the situations with cross cultural customers due to the rapid increase of foreign customers. Second, an emotional management program for service providers should be established. It is important to establish such a program for service providers because developing emotional management skills could lead to customer satisfaction by controlling perceived anger and emotion, using different emotion for any given circumstances and behaving appropriately. Third, an enterprise-wide support and delegation of power should be assigned to the hotel employees. This means forming the positive quality of service and positive customer relationship. Therefore, a management and support team or managers should assign the delegation of power and support that allows the employees to promote a job autonomy and discretion for proactive services. Even though this research proposed theoretical and practical implications by establishing the mechanism of cultural empathy and customer orientation by applying them to the marketing point of view, the limits and the necessity of future study can be summarized as follows. First, this research was limited to the service experience with cross cultural customers at the domestic hotels. However, it would be a meaningful study if a research about a comparison of foreign customers' experience at domestic and overseas hotel is conducted. Second, a research with an expanded and in-depth analysis of independent variables that form psychological burnout is needed. Third, a future study of discovering the effects of accepting intercultural communication by expanding the range of cultural empathy between the relationship of service providers and cross cultural customers. Fourth, this research was limited to a self-reporting measurement. In order to compensate the limitation of this research, a preliminary research or research design by experts is needed in the future study.