Emotional Intelligence and Hotel Employee Work Behaviour: Moderating Role of Age

: The study focused on the moderating role of age on the relationship between emotional intelligence and hotel employee work behaviour. To achieve the objective of the study, survey research design was adopted. Empathy and social skills were used to measure emotional intelligence which represent the independent variable while employee behaviour was used as the dependent variable. The researcher adopted primary data in getting the required information through the use of structured questionnaire. The population of the study is made up of 431 male and female hotel staff. The sample size of the study is 274 after adopting Taro Yamane formula. In analysis the data, moderated regression analysis was used. The findings revealed that empathy and social skills have significant influence on employee work behaviour. The findings also revealed that age moderates the relationship between emotional intelligence and employee work behaviour in hotels. Based on the findings, the study recommends that organization should institute a reward system where employees that exhibit outstanding empathy are recognized as this will engender group cohesion and understanding. Also, organizations should increase emotional intelligence and employee performance by increasing skill training to help in developing mental abilities of individual employees. The study also recommends that employees should be encouraged to develop their social skills which would lead to their greater acceptance among their colleagues and subordinates thereby enhancing the work process leading to success in the organization.


INTRODUCTION
For the first time the term Emotional Intelligence was used in 1985 from Payne and the same was considered to indicates person's ability to relate to fear, pain and desire (Peter, 2016).But as separate concept of emotional intelligence form general intelligence for the first time was introduced from Michael and Susan in 2010 as type of social intelligence which cover the ability to monitor one's own and other's emotions, discriminate among them and to use the information to guide one's thinking and actions (Michael and Susan, 2010).Maria and Ioanniss in their paper for emotional intelligence have expanded Michael and Susanmodel and defined the emotional intelligenceas ability of an individual to perceive accurately, appraise and express emotion, the ability to access and generate feelings when they facilitate thought, the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge and the ability to regulate emotional to promote emotional and intellectual growth (Tighe, 2015).
To find the way to describe the emotional intelligence we need to ask our self: How well do we connect with our self and with others?The ability to appropriately identify, recognize and manage our emotions for your own well-being as well as the wellbeing of people around us is what is described as emotional intelligence.Our emotional sensitivity, maturity and competency is what ultimately decides our destiny (Dalip, 2006).The person which is well known for promotion the concept of Emotional Intelligence is Goleman (1998) and according to him Emotional intelligence is define as: The capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationship".Cooper (1997) argues that persons which have high level of emotional intelligence are more successful and can make stronger relationships than those with low emotional intelligence.The influence of emotional intelligence on service quality is what translates into firm's performance, especially in service delivery.Moreover, emotional intelligence has been found to be positively related to service quality, customers' satisfaction and retention, and return and investment (Kernbach, 2005;and Danquah, 2014).At a greater extent, Danquah (2014) and Kernbach & Schutte (2005) found in their researches that emotional intelligence plays a moderating role in the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction.
Scholars tend to view emotional intelligence as a factor with a potential to contribute to more positive attitudes, behaviour and work outcomes.This appeal probably fuelled the claim that emotional intelligence is a key foundation of successful job performance (Joseph & Newman 2010).Mayer, Saloyey and Caruso (2000), however, asserted that emotional intelligence is a competency that is expected to augment positive attitudes toward work and drives positive behaviour towards better outcomes.According to Kportufe (2014), organizational commitment is an important determinant of organizational effectiveness.The concept organizational commitment has been constructed as incorporating: affective, continuance, and normative aspects.Emotional intelligence has been shown to be an important predictor of organizational commitment, for instance researchers (Kim, 2010) revealed that emotional intelligence was significantly and positively related to organizational commitment.
One of the major factors that determines/affects emotional intelligence is age.The core capabilities which are developed at childhood stage are malleable, changeable and capable of being developed (Ho¨pfl and Linstead, 1997).Further, the life and workplace experience has an impact in shaping it.Emotional intelligence has an impact on work performance (Carmeli 2003;O'Boyle et al. 2011) and on psychological and physical health (Ciarrochi et al. 2002;Tsaousis and Nikolau 2005).That's main reason to find the relevance and measure of emotional intelligence at different stages of emotional intelligence.
An individual moves through different stages of life in age spans.And each stage exhibits a characteristic which comes in through learning and experience.Emotional intelligence in particular when taken as ability (Mayer, Saloyey and Caruso (2000) also exhibit different patterns with age.It becomes imperative to understand the emotional intelligence levels and its nature in different age groups.There is a positive relation between emotional intelligence and age.Emotional intelligence develops or increases with age and experience (Goleman, 1998;Mayer, Saloyey and Caruso 2000); Maddocks & Sparrows, 1998).In certain studies it has been found that emotional intelligence increases with age at least up to (40-50 years of age) fourth or fifth decade in life (Bar-on, 2000;Kandampully, 2010;Bradberry & Greaves, 2009;Singh 2010).
Hotels provide services to people.Making the guests feel welcome is one of the priorities of the industry.This requires both a friendly manner on the part of the employees towards the guest and an atmosphere of "liberality and good will" among the employees serving the guests.That often translates to an organization in which workers get along well with one another, making sure that the operations of the industry will continue to provide effective service and meet its budget.The major problem faced by hotels is that the prevailing cause of poor employee behaviour in most of our hotels may be rooted from the capacity to perceive emotions, integrate emotions in thought, understand emotions and manage emotions as this is important in order to foster and enhance the intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships both at individual and corporate levels (Danquah, 2014).However, industries which cannot keep customers are those unable to relate to customers as "blood relations" (Tighe, 2015).By mentioning the phrase "blood relations", means that these industries are not able to relate to employees as biological siblings; thus, endearing stakeholders who want their needs to be seen and addressed with greater depth of brotherly warmth (Roland, 2011).Lack of training programs is another constraint to employee performance, service companies should use training programs to equip their service providers with emotional intelligence (Danquah, 2014).For managements of organizations to be motivated to invest into the acquisition of emotional intelligence, ample evidence must exist on its impact on service quality, customer satisfaction and organizational performance.As a result of the fact that the subject is relatively new, not much is known by service firms about emotional intelligence, especially its impact on employee performance (Danquah, 2014) and work behaviour.This situation has been ascribed to a lack of identifiable research on the subject.
Another, problem most hotels are facing is the age of their employees.The work of Rob (2009), revealed that age affects employee work behaviour.Mature employee behaves well in their work than those that are not mature.Unfortunately, if you go to hotels today, most of their employees are not mature and these negatively affect their job engagement and work behaviour (Roland, 2011).
Unproductive and inappropriate emotional reactions (lack of emotional intelligence skills) in business are widespread and significant (Organ, 1997).Unbridled emotional reactions or lack of emotional intelligence skills by executives and employees at all levels can lead to, negative organizational climate/culture, a disengaged workforce, inability or resistance to change (unsuccessful reengineering/process improvement initiatives), lack of innovation and creativity, reduced or missed revenue, high cost (loss of high potential talent/employee turnover, decreased productivity), decreased customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, career derailment, workplace violence, and increased stress and healthcare costs.
Consequently, there is lack of organizational citizenship behaviour.Organizational citizenship behavior is set of behaviors that are not part of the formal requirements of the job, but helps the effectiveness of work and organizations.Employees often consider these behaviors optional.Therefore, they cannot be officially recognized.The definition of organizational citizenship behavior represents the fact that these behaviors have a certain impact on the effectiveness of the organization through adding social framework to the workplace.There are several reasons to justify why organizational citizenship behavior affects the effectiveness of the organization: decreasing management productivity if not properly managed, reducing the need to extend scarce resources, creating an environment that increases employee morale (Organ, 1997).Most employees only focused/concentrate on duties assigned to them without engaging in over duty activities.For instance, in hotels the bar man may decide not to attend to a customer that wants to lodge even when the front desk is not around.He/she believes is not his duty and therefore cannot render such service.This is as result of poor organizational citizenship behaviour (Organ, 1997).

Objectives of the Study
The main objective of this study is to determine the moderating role of age on the relationship between emotional intelligence and hotel employee work behaviour.The specific objectives are to: (i) determine the influence of empathy on employee work behaviour in hotels.
(ii) determine the influence of social skills on employee work behaviour in hotels.
(iii) examine the moderating role of age on the relationship between emotional intelligence and employee work behaviour in hotels.

Concept of Emotional Intelligence
According to Charles (2011), philosophical considerations of the relations between thoughts and emotions can be traced back to over 2000 years ago.Between 1900 and 1969, research on intelligence and emotions in the domain of psychology were relatively separate.The term "EI" itself first appeared in the literature in the 1960s, which was used back then "in an incidental fashion" (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, 2004).In the early 1970s, studies were increasingly being conducted on the relationship between emotions and cognitive processes (Beck, 2013).Bythe 1980s, social scientists "had identified a number of human capacities involved in identifying and understanding emotions" (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, 2000).The term EI appeared in the literature several times before it was introduced by Mayer and Salovey and conceptualized as a topic of scientific study between 1990 and 1994.In 1995 Daniel Goleman popularized EI as a construct through his book "EI: Why it can matter more than IQ" and since 1997, through a considerable amount of peer-reviewed research conducted on the topic, the concept has developed and grown into a more refined construct (Charles, 2011).
Maintaining good personal relationships with clients is vital in the hotel industry as there is recurrent interactions between customers and hotel operators.These interactions are often influenced by the emotions of the people involved and by their behavioural modes (Andersen and Kumar 2006).In this context, managing emotions intelligently will provide a competitive advantage for developing and sustaining positive business relationships.In order to understand how emotional intelligence affects business relationships in the hotel industry, it is necessary to know about the most fundamental concepts of emotional intelligence.Mayer, Salovey and Caruso (2007) perspective of emotional intelligence specifically referred to the combination of management and emotion.They emphasized the cognitive skills of managing emotional information.A similar perspective can be found in Andersen and Kumar's (2006) work where they proposed a reciprocal linkage between emotions and cognition.They argued that cognitive states give rise to emotions and emotions, on the other hand, shape cognitive states.
Other researchers like Baron (2007) defined emotional intelligence in a broader sense to include non-cognitive abilities.Baron (2007) defined emotional intelligence as 'an array of non-cognitive capabilities, competencies and skills that influence one's ability to succeed in coping with environmental demands and pressures'.Goleman (2005) defined emotional intelligence as 'the abilities to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulses and delay gratification; to regulate one's moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think, to empathize and to hope.Abraham defined the emotional Intelligence as the ability to: (Abraham, 1999); understand your feeling and the feelings of others, ability to deal with others, the ability to form Relationships, the ability to express different emotions, independence and the ability to make decisions and perseverance and hard work.
Dalip ( 2006) in his book -Emotional Intelligence in work place argues that the Emotional Intelligence gives a person competitive advantages.According to him even in renowned business establishment, where everyone is trained to be smart the most valued and productive managers are those who have strong rates of emotional intelligence and also he argues that Being endowed with great intellectual abilities, you may become a brilliant fiscal analyst or a legal scholar, but a highly developed emotional intelligence is what will make you a candidate for a CEO, a brilliant trial lawyer, a successful politician or a powerful bureaucrat.Emotional intelligence is the ability of an individual to appropriately and successfully respond to a vast variety of emotional stimuli being elicited from the inner self and immediate environment.Emotional intelligence constitutes three psychological dimensions: emotional sensitivity, emotional maturity and emotional competency, which motivate an individual to recognize truthfully, interpret honestly and handle tactfully the dynamics of human behaviour.
Also we will provide additional definition for EI which is offered by Sparrow and Knight in Applied EI 2006 and according to him the Emotional Intelligence is habitual practice of:  Using emotional information from ourselves and other people;  Integrating this with our thinking;  Using these to inform our decision making to help us get what we want  From the immediate situation and from life in general.(Obikeze, 2005) We have different definition for emotional intelligence in different papers and literature.But all of them have one thing in common in definition, the ability to recognize our own emotions and those of others and the capacity to manage with them in ourselves and in relationship in personal and professional life.

Emotions
To address the concept of emotional intelligence precisely, one has to understand both emotions and management (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso 2004).Charles Darwin was one of the first wellknown theorists to recognize the value of emotions (Kothari 2010).He stated that emotions happen naturally and immediately in response to people and situations.Bagozzi, Gopinath and Nyer (2009) define an emotion as 'a mental state of readiness that arises from cognitive appraisals of events or thoughts it is often expressed physically (e.g. in gestures, posture, facial features); and may result in specific actions to affirm or cope with the emotion'.They suggested that, by means of the 'cognitive appraisals of events and thoughts', individuals make evaluative judgments and interpretations of specific events and physical circumstances.They proposed that different people may have different emotional responses to the same event due to their own judgments and evaluations of the event.In a hotel environment, the receptionists, waiters and waitresses all need to be emotionally intelligent in other to be able to handle some volatile situations that deal with irate customers.Plutchik (2009) took a biological perspective in the study of emotions.Plutchik (2009) identified eight primary emotions: fear, joy, anger, sadness, acceptance, expectancy, disgust and surprise.He stated that these eight emotions are important in the adaptation for survival of all kinds of living beings.Plutchik (2009) claim that other more complex emotions are built on the basic emotions.Ekman (2008) states that the first characteristic of emotion is that most emotions have a signal which enable someone to read that signal.For example, embarrassment is an emotion whose characteristic is to make one blush.The second characteristic is that emotion can be triggered in under a quarter of a second automatically and the reason behind the trigger of emotions can be very complex.The third characteristic is that the conscious experiences an initial lack of awareness about emotions that are experienced.For example, when you are getting emotional, you may not realise it until your friend tells you that you are being emotional.Ekman (2008) suggested that an individual can be trained to recognise different emotions.
Emotions affect a person's behaviour (Frijda, 2010).For example, the emotion of fear will induce an individual to withdraw from an interaction, whereas the emotion of anger will make an individual act more aggressively.Kiely (2005), suggested that the display of a specific emotion is accompanied by the expectation of certain responses from others.For instance, an individual expressing annoyance may expect the other party to stop the behaviour that is causing the annoyance.Emotions are critical to rational thinking, and that they guide behaviour and help maintain an integrated self.However, earlier psychological researchers perceived emotions in a negative way as disruptive to logical thoughts and rational functioning in hotels (Fineman 2004).
Emotion plays an important role in a business relationship of which the business of which the hotel industry is inclusive.For instance, if negative emotions appear in the early stages of interaction between a front desk officer and a customer, and such emotions are not handled properly, the probability of a successful deal is greatly reduced.On the other hand, if either party exerts an effort to manage the negative emotions and resolve conflicts, they are more likely to close a deal.Moreover, the negative emotions experienced by buyers or sellers are more likely to escalate conflicts between them.They may also increase the transaction cost as both parties are busy resolving the crisis that arose from the negative emotions.When the intensity of negative emotions grows, the cost of maintaining a relationship increases.Hence, the effective management of emotions may strengthen a business relationship whereas an ineffective management of emotions will worsen the relationship and lead to premature termination (Andersen and Kumar 2006).

Managing Customer Relationship through Emotional Intelligence
In service delivery, customer needs to feel that they are being properly cared for, given attention and dully valued by the service providers (Gift, 2011) desire but are unable to express because of ignorance, fear, lack of confidence, it ultimately gives mileage to either party (Samuel, 2010).Customers like this gesture of the service providers and organization ultimately builds brand loyalty, store loyalty and organizational loyalty.It develops long lasting relationship with the customer.Here, emotional intelligence of service provider plays a vital role.By providing personal attention, care and expressing concern leads to emergence of healthy relationship with the customer and which can be one of the reasons for customer to return or retain with the organization (Charles, 2011).According to Reichheld (2009), a company's profit can be doubled if they improve the mechanism to retain customers.Because, it is less expensive to serve long-term customer as the loyal customer have higher willingness to pay a premium price.
The image of the service firm stands on the quality of service delivered unlike the manufacturing firm which is based on the quality of their products (Emmanuel, 2010).Therefore, it is the need of the hour for marketers and service providing organizations to give due emphasis on emotional intelligence of their employees, especially frontline employee who are involved in managing the long lasting relationship with their customer (Thelma, 2011).It is high time for these organization to give due importance at the entry point, especially while selecting people, on the basis of emotional intelligence score of candidates, service providers should be selected.The organization should set a minimum standard of emotional intelligence in a candidate without which the person should not be offered service provider position within the organization.
It argues that emotional competences are not innate talents; rather they can be learned.This implies that people can be trained to acquire emotional intelligence.Though the credibility of Goleman's (2015) model has been challenged from different conceptual standpoints (Gift, 2011), it remains the most acceptable derivative for mutual social interaction and business relationships.

Role of Emotions in Service Interactions
Although some prior research has examined the role of emotions in service interactions between employees and customers, most of this research focuses on employees' outer emotional display rather than their internal emotion regulation.For example, some studies examine the relationship between employees' displayed emotions and customers' emotions by asking customers or independent observers to rate the emotional display of service employees and then linking these ratings to service evaluations.Tsai (2001) and Tsai and Huang (2002) uncovered a link between independent observers' assessments of employee affective delivery and self-reported customer mood and loyalty intentions, and Mattila and Enz (2002) similarly found a link between observational data on hotel clerks' emotional displays and customers' service encounter evaluations, as well as positive moods after the encounter.Tan, Foo, and Kwek ( 2004) reported a link between the extent of employees' positive emotions (measured by greeting, eye contact, and so forth) and customer satisfaction.These studies focused on outwardly displayed emotions and primarily addressed whether service friendliness and related observable behaviors lead to positive customer evaluations.However, they leave unexplored the underlying cognitive emotion management processes and, in particular, specific emotional intelligence strategies.
Hennig-Thurau, Groth, Paul, and Gremler (2006), in a study of the emotional contagion process, found a significant impact of employees' emotional authenticity on customers' emotions in a simulated service encounter.Grandey ( 2003) focused instead on the concept of "affective delivery"-which she defined as service delivery perceived as friendly and warm by customersas an outcome of emotional intelligence strategies and found a positive relationship with deep acting but a negative relationship with surface acting.However, in her study coworkers of the observed employees, rather than customers, assessed the affective delivery.Although these studies have revealed important insights into related phenomena, they have not revealed how emotional intelligence strategies affect the customer experience, nor the effects of whether customers are able to accurately detect emotional authenticity.

Age and Emotional Intelligence
Emotions have a significant role in defining the activities and behaviour of an individual on personal and professional front.Emotional intelligence (EI) defines the ability of the individual to sense, access, control and manage emotions of oneself and others.EI is the construct that involves the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion; the ability to access and/or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth'' (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, 2007).EI was defined as an aptitude by Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, 2007) and as mix of skills and traits (Bar-On, 2000;Goleman, 2015;Schutte et al., 1998).
The Emotional Intelligence is the key factor ability which can be developed (Goleman, 2005) and learned (Goleman, 1998) at all ages as per most of the EI theories.EI is neither developed at early childhood age is hereditary.With age, one becomes more socially and emotionally intelligent (Bar-On, 2007).EI has tremendous impact and potential value not only for managers and HR professionals but also for educationalists, teachers and counsellors (Hertzberg, 1987).This has led to questions on its role and ability to develop within learning managerial aspect (Fineman, 2004).
The core capabilities which are developed at childhood stage are malleable, changeable and capable of being developed (Fineman, 2004) There is a positive relation between EI and age.EI develops or increases with age and experience (Goleman, 1998;Salovey & Mayer, 1990;Maddocks & Sparrows, 1998).In certain studies it has been found that EI increases with age at least up to (40-50 years of age) fourth or fifth decade in life (Bar-on, 2000;Kafetsios, 2004;Stein, 2009;Bradberry & Greaves, 2005;Singh 2006).There are certain aspects of EI that can only be developed with training (Fariselli, Ghini, & Freedman, 2006).Research was conducted for EI Bar-on model (Bar-on, 1988) with the use of EQ-i (Emotional Quotient Inventory) tool on sample size of 3891 in the age ranging 20 to 50 years.The study showed that older people scored higher than the younger ones.Also respondent in their late 40s obtained highest mean scores (Bar-On,1997b;BarOn, 2004).Another study indicates that youth with age 7 to 18 years shows higher score for EI in the oldest groups of the sample size( Bar-On & Parker, 2000b).

Emotional Intelligence and Job Performance
Different factors have been found to contribute to a better or worse individual performance among employees in organizations.These factors range from personal issues, personal life to organization culture, job content and tasks, manager's attitude financial reward (Gounaris, 2005).Other factors include work engagement, organizational justice, self-efficacy, and work engagement (Fineman, 2004).Also, job performance levels can be affected by the changes in a person's psychological state and mood (Gift, 2011).Another point of view is that employees' promotions, salary and growth also depend on their job performance.For employees to develop and get promoted they have to perform at their very best; so a good salary could lead to low performance, but it could also lead to improved performance, which in its turn leads to an increase in salary.A meta-analysis of the EI-job performance relationship (Nicola, 2015) found significant effects of EI on job performance with the ability to predict an average of14% of the change in job performance.
The level of job satisfactionis a strong indicator of withdrawal behavior, intention to quit, turnover and organizational commitment.The relationship between job satisfactionand job performance has been heavily debated.This discussion intensified in the late seventies (Peter, 2016) and it was logically assumed that the more employees are satisfied, the better their performance is.Some studies suggest that job satisfactionhas a significant impact on the performance of an individual in a company (Michael and Susan, 2010).Other studies propose that there are variables acting as mediating or moderating factors between JS and job performance, concluding that positive emotions, for instance, would generate higher performance.Similarly, a meta-analysis conducted on 312 samples representing 54,417 respondents found an average correlation between JS and job performance of r=0.3.At the same time, Weissinger (2010) studied the relation among 187 employees from food industry and found that employees' EI was positively associated with job satisfactionand performance.Meanwhile, others believe that the relationship between the JS and job performanceis weak and nonexistent.
There is insufficient research on the relationship between EI, JS, and job performance.Therefore, conducting this study in the context of UJ will contribute to developing better understanding of the implications of EI in organizational settings.Moreover, this study is interested in investigating a relationship that has not been extensively studied in previous work and that is the mediating effect of JS in relationship between EI and job performance.Recent studies show growing interest in conducting studies on EI, which has led to an improvement in the conception of EI and its demonstrated ability to predict important work outcomes, and continue to reveal a wide range of potential applications of EI.Nevertheless, the majority of these studies were focused on the applications of EI within the business field, in addition to the findings being mixed.There are currently several different definitions and measuring instruments of EI which indicates vast opportunity to continue developing a better understanding of EI.Therefore, it is anticipated that conducting the study on EI in a public sector organization in Jordan may add to the body of knowledge and develop deeper understanding of EI and how it affects job performance.

Bar-On's Emotional-Social Intelligence (ESI) Model
Bar-On's Emotional-Social Intelligence (ESI) model is composed of two primary parts: (Part I) theory and (Part II) psychometric (Bar-On, 2007).The theory portion provides a conceptualization, or context, to the ESI model; the psychometric portion of the model, represented by Bar-On's EQ-I (emotional quotient inventory) assessment, provides the ability to measure ESI (Bar-On, 2007).
According to Bar-On (2007), "emotional-social intelligence is a cross-section of interrelated emotional and social competencies, skills and facilitators that determine how well we understand and express ourselves, understand others and relate with them, and cope with daily demands".Emotional-social intelligence, according to Bar-On ( 2007), was about clearly understanding oneself, expressing oneself, understanding others, relating to others, and effectively dealing with the pressures of daily life, including problems and unexpected changes.Bar-On's (2007) ESI model was first and foremost based on "one's intrapersonal ability to be aware of oneself, to understand one's strengths and weaknesses, and to express one's feelings and thoughts nondestructively".The interpersonal level of Bar-On's (2007) model involves the ability to discern others' emotions, their needs, their feelings, and the ability to build and maintain healthy relationships.At its core, ESI is about emotions working for, rather than against people (Bar-On, 2007).
However, this study was anchored on emotional competence Theory.This is because the theory explained how emotion can affect the behaviour of workers in their work place.The theory also discussed on the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.

Empirical Reviews
Peter ( 2016), conducted a research on the influence of Emotional Intelligence on job performance and job satisfaction as well as the mediating role of job satisfaction on job performance among the administrative employees of the University of Jordan.This study was based on Mayer and Salovey's (2000) ability model of Emotional Intelligence.A sample consisted of 354 employees from the University of Jordan who completed self-report questionnaire.Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used in order to test the proposed hypotheses.The research found that Emotional Intelligence is positively correlated with job performance and job satisfaction.The findings of this study also confirm the mediatory role of job satisfaction in relationship between Emotional Intelligence and job performance.It is suggested that Emotional Intelligence can be used to predict job performance and job satisfaction, therefore the understanding of Emotional Intelligence theory and its applications can be promoted for managerial and human resource practices throughout public sector organizations.
Carmeli ( 2003) investigated the possible influence that emotionally intelligent leaders have on encouraging and nurturing positive work attitudes, promoting altruistic behaviors, and improving work outcomes.To study the interactions of the research hypothesis, Carmeli (2003) used hierarchical regression to determine the effect of emotional intelligence on each of the dependent variables.Using 98 responses received through a direct mail questionnaire sent to more than 260 senior managers, Carmeli (2003) conducted a series of separate hierarchical regression analyses.Following a twostep process, the control variables of organizational size, tenure in the organization, and gross income, as well as the dependent variables of job performance and withdrawal intentions, were entered into the analytic model.Both variables were then mean-centered, making them product terms.He concluded that leaders with emotional intelligence did influence such organizational climate outcomes.The results showed there was a statistical significance with a p < 0.01 for job performance, specifically as it relates to work attitude, work behavior, and work outcomes.
Koman and Wolff ( 2008) conducted a Pearson correlation analysis between team leader emotional intelligence and the development of emotional competent group norms.Team leader emotional intelligence competency included accurate self-assessment, emotional selfawareness, self-confidence, achievement orientation, adaptability, emotional self-control, resourcefulness, positivity, transparency, compassion, organizational awareness, service orientation, change catalyst, conflict management, developing others, influence, inspiring leadership, and collaboration.Group emotional competency includes interpersonal understanding, confronting members who break norms, caring behavior, team selfevaluation, creating resources for working with emotions, creating a positive environment, proactive problem solving, organizational understanding, and building external relations.Of 162 correlations, all but 36 were found to have a positive relationship between the team leader emotional intelligence competencies and the group norms with p < 0.05 or p < 0.001.Conflict management was the only team leader emotional intelligence competency that showed no relationship with any emotional competent group norm.The research findings support the importance of team leader behaviors with the development of team norms.Also, emotionally competent group norms are related to performance.The findings support and reinforce the contributory value emotions bring to team performance.It would be beneficial for team leaders to understand how best to use their emotions in a constructive, helpful way to develop strong team performance.Though the research provided valuable insight into military team behaviors and performance, the research findings may not be as applicable to other types of work teams outside the military.Teamwork is a critical necessity and is reinforced and practiced within the military culture.Additional studies need to be conducted in private industries.
Langhorn ( 2004) hypothesized a positive relationship between managerial emotional intelligence and business profitability.His study determined the manager's emotional intelligence contribute approximately 9% to profit growth.He studied 109 male and 52 female general managers of restaurants located in the United Kingdom.Using the Bar-on (1999) EQi with other performance data collected, he concluded that restaurants managed by general managers with higher emotional intelligence were more profitable than restaurants managed by general managers with low emotional intelligence.The emotional intelligence competencies that showed the greatest influence on predicting profitability were social responsibility (p=0.042,β= -0.274, t-value= 2.052) and empathy (p=0.003,β= -0.415, t-value= -3.061).
Shooshtarian, Ameli, and Aminilari (2013) conducted a cross-sectional study of employees working within a set of Iranian corporations to determine the relationship between the employees' emotional intelligence and their job satisfaction and performance.Questionnaires were sent to 350 employees of Fars Province Industries located in southwest Iran with 289 participants responding.Several different surveys were used, including the Modified Schutte Emotional Intelligence Scale (MSEIS) to assess emotional intelligence, the Grikson Instrument to measure job satisfaction, and the Alen and Meyer Questionnaire to collect data relating to the employees' commitment.Also, the researchers used a questionnaire they designed to solicit job performance data.Each tool was tested for reliability using Cronbach's coefficient alpha.Shooshtarian et al. (2013) were able to show that a significant relationship existed between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction (r = 0.184, p< 0.001).Of particular interest are participants with higher emotional intelligence exhibited skills to identify and control emotions.This lends to their ability to recognize stressful situations and effectively bring about appropriate ways to minimize them.

Gap in Literature
Empirical studies relating to the subject matter have been reviewed in this work.For example Peter (2016), conducted a research on the influence of Emotional Intelligence on job performance and job satisfaction as well as the mediating role of job satisfaction on job performance among the administrative employees of the University of Jordan.Carmeli (2003) investigated the possible influence that emotionally intelligent leaders have on encouraging and nurturing positive work attitudes, promoting altruistic behaviors, and improving work outcomes.Also, Koman and Wolff (2008) conducted a Pearson correlation analysis between team leader emotional intelligence and the development of emotional competent group norms.Unfortunately, none of these empirical reviews used age as a moderator.Hence this study intends to fill in the gap by examining the influence of emotional intelligence on employees' work behaviours in selected hotel using age as moderating variable.

METHODOLOGY Philosophical Assumption
This research aims to explain relationship between two variables (consumption and academic performance), evaluate the variables, and draw conclusions based on the findings.The positivist paradigm is used.During this research work, a deductive approach was adopted.The quantitative research method was used to gather and analyze data in this study.Because this research involved testing hypotheses and the data acquired was tested using statistical techniques, quantitative research was used.

Research Approach and Strategy
A positivistic method to quantitative research typically posits that hypotheses/assumptions are derived from some theoretical or imaginary concept, making it deductive in nature, which is occasionally referred to as theory testing.Because the goal is to see if current theoretical frameworks can be applied to our empirical study data, deductive research approach was adopted on this thesis titled "moderating role of gender on the relationship between emotional intelligence and hotel employee work behaviour.

Research Hypotheses
The following null hypotheses were be tested in the course of this study H01: Empathy has no significant influence on employee work behaviour in hotels.H02: Social skills have no significant influence on employee work behaviour in hotels.H03: Age does not play any significant role on the relationship between emotional intelligence and employee work behaviour in hotels.

Data Collection
The survey research design was used in this study.This is a quantitative approach of data collection from a group of people by asking them question relating to staff involvement in decision making and how it affect hotel performance.The usage of a survey in data gathering is focused toward answering the research questions inherent in the project in order to meet the research's goals and objectives.This helped in the development of remedies to the identified issue.To generate data from respondents, questionnaire instrument was used.Closed ended questions on a four -point scale were used to create the questionnaire.In addition, the questions are well-structured.The close ended includes; Strongly Agreed (SA) = 4, Agreed (A) = 3, Disagreed (D) = 2 and Strongly Disagreed (SD) =1.

Sample Size
The sample size of the study are 274 selected staff of 10 selected hotels in Imo State, Nigeria.Only available staff were evaluated, and convenient sampling method were used.

Data Analysis Techniques and Procedures
Descriptive statistics was used to summarize the gathered data in a clear and understandable manner using a numerical technique.To test hypotheses, moderated regression analysis (MRA) was used.

Data Presentation
This study examined moderating role of gender on the relationship between emotional intelligence and employee work behaviour.Self-awareness and self-control were used as measures for emotional intelligence which represent the independent variable, employee work behaviour was used as the dependent variable while age was used as the moderating variable.The moderated regression analysis (MRA) with the help of statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version 22 was used to analyze the data.The data for the variables are shown in appendix.

Data Analysis
This section analyzed the data presented in the previous section with the aid of statistical package for social sciences (SPSS,version 22).The analysis of data is presented in the subsequent sections:

Descriptive statistics
The descriptive statistics for both the dependent and independent variables are presented in table 4.1 below:

Source: SPSS Version 22 Output (Appendix 2A)
Table 4.1 presents the descriptive statistics of all the variables.N represents the number of observations and therefore the number of observation for the study is 206.
Empathy has a mean of 3.3398 with a deviation of 0.85601.The empathy also revealed a minimum and maximum value of 1.0 and 4.0 respectively.
The result revealed the value of 3.3495 and 0.91288 as mean and standard deviation values for social skills (SS).It also revealed a minimum and maximum value of 1.0 and 4.0 respectively for SS.Age the minimum value is 1.0 while the reported maximum value is 4.0.Again the mean value recorded is 3.4563 with a standard deviation is 0.80579 which explains that age can influence the level of emotional intelligence.
Finally, employee behaviour (EB) revealed a minimum and maximum value of 1.0 and 4.0 while its' mean and standard deviation is 3.2330 and 0.79270.

Moderated Regression Analysis
This section of the chapter presents the results produced by the model summaries for further analysis.The R value of 0.911 shows that, there is a strong relationship between empathy and social skills at 91.1%.Also the R 2 stood at 0.830.The R 2 otherwise known as the coefficient of determination shows the percentage of the total variation of the employee work behaviour (EB) can be explained by empathy and social skills.However, the remaining 17.0% (i.e.100-R 2 ) could be accounted by other variables not included in this model.
Table 4.3 presents the moderated regression result of the influence of age on the relationship between emotional intelligence and employee work behaviour of hotels.

DISCUSSION ON FINDINGS
The result revealed that empathy and social skills have significant influence on employee work behaviour.The findings also showed that age moderates the relationship between emotional intelligence and employee work behaviour in hotels.These results are consistent to the following results Peter (2016), conducted a study that explored the relationship between service personnel's emotional intelligence and customers' perceived service quality in the context of the hi-tech industry in Singapore.The data were analysed using a bundle of statistical methods which included correlation analysis, independent t-test, ANOVA, principal component analysis and canonical correlation analysis.The results showed that emotional intelligence is correlated positively to service quality.The findings also consistent to the findings of Carmeli ( 2003) investigated the possible influence that emotionally intelligent leaders have on encouraging and nurturing positive work attitudes, promoting altruistic behaviors, and improving work outcomes.He concluded that leaders with emotional intelligence did influence such organizational climate outcomes.The finding is consistent with the findings of Kim (2010), who carried out a research.The research aim was to identify the effect of Emotional Intelligence (using social skills as the variable) employee's performance in their working place.There is significant correlation between the level of EQ and the Index of Managing Changes.

Conclusion
To find the way to describe the Emotional Intelligence we need to ask our self: How well do we connect with our self and with others?The ability to appropriately identify, recognize and manage our emotions for your own well-being as well as the wellbeing of people around us is what is described as emotional intelligence.Our emotional sensitivity, maturity and competency is what ultimately decides our destiny.The person which is well known for promotion the concept of emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, assess and control the emotions of oneself, of others and of groups.It is also "the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions".The ability to realize, readily accept, as well as successfully control feelings in oneself (and sometimes others) is known as emotional intelligence.Emotional intelligence can be seen as a relationship tool on which effective service delivery accelerates.This makes Emotional intelligence the basis for effective service delivery.

Recommendations
Based on the findings of this study, the following recommendations have been made: a) The organization should institute a reward system where employees that exhibit outstanding empathy are recognized as this will engender group cohesion and understanding.b) Organizations should increase emotional intelligence and employee performance by increasing skill training to help in developing mental abilities of individual employees; c) Employees should be encouraged to develop their social skills which would lead to their greater acceptance among their colleagues and subordinates thereby enhancing the work process leading to success in the organization.
. Further, the life and workplace experience has an impact in shaping it.EI has an impact on work performance(Carmeli 2003; O'Boyle et al. 2011)and on psychological and physical health(Ciarrochi et al. 2002; Tsaousis and Nikolau 2005).That's main reason to find the relevance and measure of EI at different stages of EI.An individual moves through different stages of life in age spans.And each stage exhibits a characteristic which comes in through learning and experience.EI in particular when taken as ability(Mayer &  Salovey)also exhibit different patterns with age.It becomes imperative to understand the EI levels and its nature in different age groups.

Table 4 .
2 presents the regression result between emotional intelligence (empathy and social skills) and employee work behaviour.From the model summary in table 4.2, the following information can be distilled.