The influence of cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence on nurses' work engagement among medical tourism providers in Malaysia : the mediating role of emotional labor and the moderating role of services climate

Abstract

Medical tourism is a sunrise industry with huge economic potential. It is a phenomenon which is described as the movement of people from their home country to another destination seeking for healthcare. While economic impact of medical tourism has been well researched, however, less known is the impact of rapid influx of foreign patients on healthcare providers themselves. The nature of medical tourism makes healthcare employees work within an environment that is both physically and emotionally very demanding and can be more challenging within a cross-cultural context due to circumstance of the patients. Realizing the need to support healthcare employees to cope with these challenges, the study aims to formulate an integrated model of employees’ work engagement by concurrently investigating a set of capabilities that are noted to impact employee outcomes, namely, cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence. Specifically, this research involves an empirical investigation of the influences of cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence on work engagement directly and indirectly through emotional labour strategies. The role of perceived climate of service as a moderator on the relationships among independent and dependent variables is also examined. The research employed survey questionnaire collected from 315 nurses working with 19 medical tourism providers that were randomly selected. The study used the two factor analysis approaches, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to determine the dimensionality and construct validity of cultural intelligence, emotional intelligence, emotional labour and work engagement in such new context. The fourteen hypotheses were examined by employing structural equation modeling (SEM). The study indicated significant positive effects of cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence on work engagement. These relationships are found to be mediated by at least one of the emotional labour strategies. The study also identifies the moderating influence of the degree of perceived service climate in the relationships among emotional intelligence, cultural intelligence and work engagement. The findings provide some important implications towards the current theories, human resource policies and managerial practices. The findings will also provide increased validity for the service providers to design and develop training intervention to increase cultural and emotional management capabilities among employees. This will enable employees to better adjust to a challenging work environment, and thereby provide superior service which complements their technical expertise at work.