Emotional Intelligence in Management to Lead Sustainable Tourism

Tourism and hospitality are people‑intensive industries where every decision unfolds in close contact with communities, guests, employees, and partners. Success depends on the subtle, often invisible work of managing relationships, in other words, work shaped by emotions and expectations. Yet while these human dynamics sit at the heart of the sector, they remain surprisingly understudied and undervalued in mainstream management thinking.

The Overlooked Emotional Work of Managing in Tourism and Hospitality

Managing in tourism and hospitality means navigating a web of stakeholders, each carrying their own values and emotional investments. Despite this proximity to people, relationship management remains underemphasized in investment rooms and business school classrooms, where rationality and resource allocation continue to dominate the discussion.

Stakeholder complexity may be well established in management discourse, but the emotional complexity of entrepreneurship still tends to be treated as intuition, personality, or “soft skills” rather than a capability in its own right. Until this work is recognized, we cannot study it, let alone master it to support managerial success.

So, how can we learn to “better” manage relationships for venture success? We suggest starting to learn more about a particular type of emotional intelligence: ability-emotional intelligence based on cognitive abilities that can be taught and developed.

We also suggest studying a particular type of entrepreneur – one that manages to reconcile the usual antagonists: economic and social value creation. The ability to manage relationships becomes especially important in tourism social enterprises, where social and economic objectives coexist and sometimes collide, and where legitimacy depends less on formal authority than on the ability to navigate tension and trust over time.

In such settings, performance hinges on strategic resource allocation choices and on how entrepreneurs regulate their responses across interactions. Therefore, we propose to study tourism social entrepreneurship to uncover the underlying dynamics in relationship management, specifically the ability-emotional intelligence at work. 

Three Dimensions of Emotional Intelligence 

The term ‘emotional intelligence’ gained traction since Goleman’s first work in 1995 and has become part of the common language and management vocabulary. Psychology literature distinguishes three components of emotional intelligence:

• Trait-Emotional Intelligence pertains to self-perceptions of emotional tendencies. These are personal dispositions, such as empathy, optimism, and sociability.

• Ability-Emotional Intelligence refers to the cognitive abilities to accurately perceive, interpret, use, and regulate emotions. Because it is not a disposition but a cognitive ability, it can be trained, improved, and learned to achieve greater success in managing human relationships.

• Mixed-Emotional Intelligence encompasses the behavioural competencies, such as teamwork or adaptability, which explain managerial performance and venture outcomes. These are the competencies that are enabled by the trait and ability-emotional intelligence dimensions. 

Why Ability-Emotional Intelligence Matters for Sustainable Management

In our latest article in the Annals of Tourism Research (Blal & Völker, 2026), we propose to map emotional intelligence onto the components of the social entrepreneurial process in tourism (Figure 1). Our purpose is to map which dimensions of emotional intelligence apply to which steps of social entrepreneurship. By doing so, we aim to uncover the skills and capabilities required to successfully manage the emotional work commanded by social entrepreneurship. 

In this view, trait-emotional intelligence provides the emotional dispositions associated with a social mission, while ability-emotional intelligence processes emotional information. Together, they contribute to the behavioral competencies represented in mixed models and are pivotal to the successful management of the venture.

This integrated structure aligns with social entrepreneurship, in which emotional dispositions and competencies interact within a diverse and dynamic stakeholder environment. Emotional intelligence emerges as pivotal for understanding and promoting stakeholder multiplicity. 

Ability-emotional Intelligence, and Stakeholder Engagement

Tourism social enterprises operate through intricate stakeholder relationships. Communities, employees, partners, guests, funders, and public institutions interact through contracts or formal roles, but they are also subject to expectations, cultural perceptions, values, and emotional investments that can cause conflict at both the individual and group levels. In such contexts, stakeholder engagement in tourism social enterprises is vital to the launch and survival of the venture.

Ability-emotional intelligence in managing the venture becomes particularly salient here. The capacity to perceive diverse and conflicting emotional signals, interpret their meaning, use emotions, and regulate responses across interactions shapes how entrepreneurs manage relationships, navigate tension, balance economic and social value, and preserve trust. Relationship management, in this setting, constitutes a core dimension of how legitimacy is built and maintained over time in tourism social enterprises.

Emotional Work Under Hybrid Logics

Tourism social enterprises operate under hybrid logics, where economic viability and social value creation coexist and, at times, collide. These tensions place emotional strain on entrepreneurs, who must continually arbitrate between financial imperatives, community expectations, and long-term social goals. Such trade-offs rarely present clear solutions and often unfold under conditions of uncertainty and time pressure.

In this context, emotional work becomes inseparable from managerial decision-making. Ability-emotional intelligence supports entrepreneurs in making emotionally informed decisions by regulating their own responses, recognizing the emotional implications of strategic choices, and sustaining engagement despite tension. Under hybrid logic, emotional intelligence in management functions as a capability that enables ventures to remain viable without eroding their social mission.

Relationship Management as a Learnable Managerial Capability

Despite its importance, relationship management often remains implicit in theory and education. In practice, managers and entrepreneurs are expected to “handle people” by drawing on innate capabilities or learned experience. At best, soft skills are praised as some magical talent people have, as “naturals,” or as something learned through mystical training. As a result, entrepreneurs and managers are expected to navigate complex human dynamics without explicit tools to support stakeholder engagement and decision-making.

Focusing on ability-emotional intelligence offers a different lens. Because it refers to cognitive abilities rather than dispositions, it can be identified, learned, trained and developed. In the tourism sector, this perspective reframes emotional intelligence in management as a practical capability that strengthens relationship management, supports stakeholder engagement and contributes to sustained venture performance.

Toward Sustainable Management and Long-term Performance

It is time to start seeing sustainability beyond a narrow lens of conflicting resource allocation. Researching social enterprises in tourism and hospitality reveals the foundational mechanisms for building resilient and sustainable ventures. Financial models, legal structures, business models, and resource allocation are part of structural architecture. But around this architecture or underneath this structure lie sustained and reliable human relationships. That intricate web of human engagement and commitment is what seals the deal. Therefore, emotional intelligence in management becomes a condition for endurance, particularly in contexts where trust, legitimacy, and community engagement evolve slowly and remain fragile.

Recognizing emotional work, and in particular ability-emotional intelligence, as part of managerial practice invites a broader understanding of performance in tourism and hospitality. It shifts attention from short-term effectiveness to relational continuity, resilience, and long-term value creation. In this sense, tourism social entrepreneurship offers a window into future management practices. Leaders who thrive in that future will treat emotional information as part of their decision toolkit rather than as noise to be managed around.

Dr. Inès Blal – Associate Professor at EHL Hospitality Business School

Dr. Juliane Völker – Swiss Center for Affective Sciences at University of Geneva