An assessment of hotel employees ethnocultural skills with customers: The case of Parsian hotels group

The current research comprises two main purposes. First, to measure ethnocultural empathic skills of front-line employees of Parsian hotel groups in order to improve likely relevant weaknesses. Second, to verify interrelationships between ethnocultural empathic skills, job satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behavior variables. To this end, empathic skills were measured through ethnocultural empathic scale and its four dimensions (Wang et al., 2003). Methodologically this study in terms of the goal, nature of data analysis, and method of data analysis is an applied research, descriptive, and quantitative, respectively. The data were gathered through two different self-reported questionnaires distributed among two different statistical populations of hotel employees (for empathy and satisfaction variables: 162 samples) and their colleagues/ supervisors (for organizational citizenship behavior variable: 176 samples). Reliability and validity of the research were confirmed through interview with experts, structural equation modeling, and Cronbach’s alpha. The findings of structural equation modeling indicate that employees’ empathic skills have no significant impact on citizenship behavior. Furthermore, job satisfaction exerts a strong influence on empathic skills with a coefficient of 0.343.