Social and Emotional Skills for Tourism and Hospitality Industry Workers
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Abstract
This research aimed to study and identify the distinctive and necessary social and emotional skills for the tourism and hospitality industry staff. A mixed method with a parallel design approach between quantitative research and qualitative research was employed using questionnaires and interviews as data collection tools. The population included workers operating in the tourism and hospitality industries in the six Andaman provinces of Thailand. Data were collected from 400 workers using non-probability sampling by accidental selection methods and from 30 interviewees using the purposive sampling selection. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, content analysis, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and importance-performance analysis (IPA). Results revealed that 1) emotional intelligence, flexibility and adaptability, and customer service were the most important and necessary social and emotional skills for working in the industry, 2) social and emotional skills are specific to each job in the tourism and hospitality workers, which can be categorized into three groups, including primary skills, secondary skills, and auxiliary skills. The findings from this study will benefit human resource management and serve as an important knowledge for the development of manpower potential and desired characteristics of the tourism and hospitality industry staff.
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