Cultural Intelligence and Proactive Service Performance: Mediating and Moderating Role of Collaborative Leadership, Cultural Training, and Emotional Labo

Abstract

This study uses cultural intelligence and social exchange theories to explore how cultural intelligence affects proactive service performance among healthcare practitioners. It also examines the mediating role of collaborative leadership and the moderating role of cultural training and emotional labor, including both deep acting and surface acting. The study involved 510 healthcare practitioners, and the hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling. The study examined three direct relationships and four indirect relationships between the study constructs, including the mediating effect of collaborative leadership and the moderating effect of both cultural training and emotional labor (deep acting and surface acting) on these relationships. The results indicate that cultural intelligence positively influences proactive service performance, showing its role in enhancing performance of healthcare providers when communicating with patients from diverse cultural backgrounds. Similarly, cultural intelligence has a positive relationship with collaborative leadership, probably because collaboration fosters an understanding of discrete cultures, integration, and interdependencies through the sharing of vision, values, and mutual goals. Collaborative leadership also has a positive relationship with proactive service performance, suggesting that when employees are exposed to collaborative leadership, they feel cared for and can work more authentically. Our findings show a notable mediation effect, highlighting that the impact of cultural intelligence on proactive service performance is contingent upon the level of collaborative leadership experienced by healthcare professionals. This suggests that the positive influence of cultural intelligence on proactive v service performance in healthcare professionals is channeled through its impact on collaborative leadership. Our study also highlights crucial moderation effects, indicating that emotional labor and cultural training play a moderation role in the relationship between cultural intelligence and proactive service performance. Specifically, higher levels of deep acting emotional labor and cultural training amplify the positive relationship between cultural intelligence and proactive service performance. However, surface acting also had a significant positive impact on this relationship, which was not hypothesized. These findings suggest that public sector healthcare organizations should prioritize improving deep acting emotional labor, cultural training, and collaborative leadership to enhance service performance. This study’s novelty lies in its integrated framework based on cultural intelligence and social exchange theories. This could help healthcare providers operating in emerging markets to address challenges through the integration of cultural intelligence and service performance.

Keywords: Cultural intelligence, Proactive service performance, Leadership's collaborative nature, Cultural training, Emotional labor, Healthcare