Emotional intelligence or artificial intelligence– an employee perspective

Abstract

Emotional intelligence as personal intelligence and artificial intelligence as a machine intelligence have been popular in the relevant literature over the last two decades. The current study integrates these two concepts and explores how emotional and artificial intelligence influences employee retention and performance with a focus on service employees in the hotel industry. Employee performance is operationalised into internal and external dimensions that captures employees’ task efficiency over both internal and external service encounters with co-workers and customers respectively. The data were collected from a variety of different ranking hotels. The results show that emotional intelligence has a significant effect on employee retention and performance; whereas artificial intelligence plays a significant moderating role in employee performance. A discussion of the findings and implications concludes this paper.