English abstract
In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the role of empathy in service quality. As an emerging destination, Iran has the opportunity to develop its tourism service experiences. To meet this objective, it is essential for hotels and more broadly tourism sector to have employees with well-developed empathy skills in order to accommodate their guests. The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1994) is used in an Islamic context to determine Iranian hospitality workers' predisposition to engage in empathic relations in delivery of their services. Being as one of the few investigations which has measured the employees' empathy levels in such a context, it has provided a benchmark with which comparisons might be drawn as a function of work and travel experience, gender, and generational membership, as well as the relationship this might hold to established normative scores. The results emerging from this investigation were vastly different from patterns in normative values. The study findings are considered in both cultural and industry context, with managerial implications discussed, concluding with suggestions for future research.
