Development of hospitality and tourism employees’ emotional intelligence through developing their emotion recognition abilities

Understanding the basic emotions of people is one of the most important skills of emotional intelligence. This study investigates the emotion/facial expression recognition abilities of tourism and hospitality employees in terms of recognizing customers‘ facial expressions and the fact that whether emotion/facial recognition abilities of employees can be developed. The respondents were selected through convenience sampling. The data were collected from 398 tourism and hospitality employees through an online survey. The data were analyzed by SPSS 19. The findings showed that a brief online training (lasting an average of 40.40 s) (with photos depicting different facial expressions and brief explanations) has improved the emotion/facial expression recognition abilities of tourism and hospitality employees significantly both in terms of accuracy and speed.