Role of emotional intelligence in services marketing – an empirical study with reference to commercial banks in Odisha

This paper focuses on the relationship between service orientation and emotional intelligence (EI) in banking sector. Emotional intelligence is very crucial across all service sectors, particularly banks. Banks compete in the market place with undifferentiated products and the quality of service encounter is the factor that gives it a distinct marketing edge, resulting in better financial performance, competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, market share and customer loyalty. The concept of EI encapsulates many of the key competencies that is required for a favourable service encounter. Dimensions of organizational service orientation is examined and found that it has close connection with personal factors of employee. Review of research literature suggests that EI can be developed and since service orientation is an important dimension of EI, it is argued that training and developing EI facilitates higher levels of organizational service orientation. It is argued that EI can act as a catalyst in enhancing service orientation behaviors. This paper throws some light on that aspect by reviewing literatures and putting forward a concept which requires serious research as to the nature of relationship between emotional intelligence and service behaviours especially in the context of banking sector.