Understanding Hospitality and Tourism Students’ Emotional Intelligence Performance in the E-learning Environment: A Delphi Approach

ABSTRACT The COVID 19 pandemic has forced educators and students to embrace e-learning. It has become urgent that educators expedite their efforts in establishing criteria to assess the overall effectiveness of e-learning, in which student emotional intelligence (EI) cultivation and development play an increasingly centric role. However, a survey of the current literature shows that EI in e-learning appears to have received little attention. This study was thus designed to help fill this research void. Specifically, it set out to understand typical hospitality and tourism students’ EI behaviors in the e-learning environment. To achieve this goal, this study applied a two-round Delphi approach. The findings show that in the e-learning environment, students commonly exhibit high self-awareness, low self-management, low social management, and low relationship-building competence. Prior EI studies mainly focus on employee performance and behavior but this study extends the effect of EI in education and offers significant implications for hospitality and tourism educators and researchers (word count: 155).