Abstract
Customers experience intense negative emotions during various types of service encounters. In such cases, the ability of contact employees to perceive, understand, and regulate these emotions, - i.e. to display emotionally competent behaviors - is considered crucial for subsequent service evaluations and loyalty to the provider. Accurately measuring employee emotional competence (EEC) could help service managers to diagnose problems in the service experience and find ways to improve it. Extant measures of EEC are employee-based and often subject to response distortion and faking. Moreover, the use of these scales in service encounters is problematic due to their length. In the present article we develop and validate a concise customer-based measure of EEC. Based on a review of the literature in social psychology, relationship marketing, and services marketing, as well as data gathered from in-depth interviews, we develop a conceptual framework and generate an item pool. The scale is empirically validated by examining its reliability and convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. The threedimensional structure of emotional competence suggested by extant literature is confirmed.
