Relationships between emotional intelligence and tour leader guiding styles

This research has been conducted for this study in order to determine if there is a statistical relationship between emotional quotient levels of tourist guides and tourist guides style of tourist guide in Turkey. Firstly, literatüre was reviewed about tourist guides, imotional intelligence and guiding styles. The questionnaire consists of 75 questions. Tsaur and Teng's Tour Leader Guiding Style measurement was adopted to determine tourist guides' style, and in order to determine tourist guide's emotional intelligence level, Min's a short-form style measure for assesment of emotional intelligence for tour guides' that was called as Emotional Skills Assesment Process-Conducted Version (ESAP-CV) instrument for tour guides was adopted. According to the information received from TUREB, as of January 2017, the universe of the researchers constitutes 10189 tourist guides in Turkey. In the research field research method was used. Because of the limited cost, time and accessibility of the study, by limiting the field of application area, convenience sampling method is easily introduced from non-random sampling methods. The total sample of 381 tourist guide participated in the study. The data derived by a questionnaire were analyzed and evaluated by means of statistical program developed for social sciences. First of all, the frequency analysis of the demographics of the respondents was defined. Parallel analysis of Horn (1965) was conducted to determine the number of the factor then factor analysis was carried out to determine which factor was generated from which data. Correlation coefficient analysis was conducted so as to represent the linear interdependence of emotional intelligence factors and tour guide styles factors. In order to determine if there is a statistical defferences between 98 emotional intelligence-tour guides styles factors and demographic characteristics, t-test, ANOVA (one-way analysis of variance), and Kruskall-Wallis H Test were performed. According to the result; four guiding style (Member Priority, Constant Reminding, Responsible, and Communicative Style) and three emotional intelligence factors (Professional Motivation, Social Competence, Problem Solving) were obtained. The obtained results from correlation analyze indicated that Social Competence is correlated with Communicative Style, Member Priority and Constant Reminding. Furthermore, it has been found that there are some differences between emotional intelligences' and tour guiding styles' factors between gender, age, years of experience, guidance education of participants. Key Words: 1) Tourism Guidance 2) Tourist Guides' Guiding Style 3) Emotional Intelligence