The contribution of emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence to interaction involvement, emotional exhaustion and job performance of call center representatives in the Philippines

Abstract

The Philippines is one of the major outsourcing destinations of the call center industry in the world. The call center business in the Philippines has been heralded as the latest sunshine industry, and its growth is mainly driven by contact center services. Needless to say, a handful of researches have found drawbacks about the emotive and psychosomatic weaknesses in the nature of works in call centers. Indeed, this kind of work is a very challenging endeavor as it is coupled with the fact that every call center representative needs to do multi-tasking. Stress would come easily especially when demands rise up from both customers and management. A call center job was described to dwell in a stressful work atmosphere, carried out in a highly pressured work tone as agents need to meet quotas, technically lacking control and performance are highly monitored. The context of culture is another major issue that call center agents has to face in their line of work. As they are virtually dealing with foreign clients, misunderstanding and miscommunication due to some cultural differences in language, tone of voice and word meaning are likely to happen, and this gives immense stress to call center agents. To be able to find solution of the problems mentioned, this research investigated the contribution of emotional intelligence (EQ) and cultural intelligence (CQ) to interaction involvement, emotional exhaustion and job performance of call center agents in the Philippines. The survey data were collected from 425 call center agents from seven business process outsourcing firms in the Philippines. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling was used for data analysis. As for the overall findings showed that EQ and CQ can facilitate interaction involvement among the call center agents, which allows them to demonstrate satisfactory job performance. However, only CQ directly explains the satisfactory job performance. This study provides practical contributions to various business process outsourcing (BPO), call centers and outsource companies not just in the Philippines but all over the world. For instance, suggest some guidelines and possible solutions for reducing stress encountered by the call center agents. Moreover, the results from this research may provide some valuable contributions to management in the area of human resource management. Furthermore, this research may help the management in understanding and considering the competencies needed in the call center and help them to recruit the right people fitted for this type of service. It also provides further information related to the cultural training that human resource management should require to the newly hired people. It may help agents to improve their skills and be able to perform better.