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This paper aims to aims to extend emotional labor research by exploring whether the impact of emotional labor on customer satisfaction depends on the order in which different emotional labor strategies are used by employees. Specifically, the authors explore how the order effects of two emotional labor strategies – deep and surface acting – impact customer satisfaction.

The authors conducted two experimental studies in which participants interacted with service employees who systematically switched between surface and deep acting strategies during the service episode. In Study 1, participants watched a video clip depicting a service encounter in a bookstore. In Study 2, participants partook in a simulated career-counseling session.

The four different emotional labor strategy order effects differentially impact customer satisfaction. Consistent with theories of gain–loss effects, improvement and decline trends positively or negatively impact customers, respectively. Furthermore, results show that these trends impact customer satisfaction growth differently over time.

The authors only focused on two emotional labor strategies, and future research may benefit from extending the research to additional regulation strategies and/or specific discrete emotions.

The results suggest that managers may train employees in recognizing that customer satisfaction is not just driven by customers’ overall assessment of the interaction but also by their experience at different stages of the interaction.

Service marketing and management scholars have largely explored emotional labor from a between-person or within-person perspective, with little empirical attention paid to within-episode processes that focus on how employee behavior varies within a single service episode. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to demonstrate that surface and deep acting can be used simultaneously and dynamically over the course of a single service interaction in impacting customer satisfaction.

Emotions are an important aspect of work performance but are often overlooked, especially amongst preschool teachers whose work environment is laden with emotional job demands. The present study aims to examine the mediating role of emotional exhaustion in the relationship between emotional labour and contextual performance.

Using a cross-sectional design, data were obtained from 288 preschool teachers in the Tema Metropolis in the Greater Accra region of Ghana. The study's hypotheses were tested using structural equation modelling with maximum likelihood estimation in AMOS 21.0.

The structural equation modelling analyses revealed that deep acting had a direct positive relationship with contextual performance, whereas the direct relationship between surface acting and contextual performance was not statistically significant. Furthermore, deep acting and surface acting were indirectly related to contextual performance via emotional exhaustion.

The study's findings underscore the need for educational institutions and managers to create a supportive environment for teachers engaging in emotional labour, and to ensure that emotional labour is not overburdening teachers.

The study contributes to the literature on teachers' engagement in discretionary behaviours by elucidating emotional exhaustion as a linking mechanism between emotional labour and contextual performance in a non-Western context. This is one of the few studies to link emotional labour to contextual performance in the educational context.

Performing emotional labour is required of customer-contact employees (CCEs) to regulate their emotions through acting to conform to organisational display rules. Prior research is focused on investigating the detrimental outcomes of CCEs engaging in emotional labour acting to meet these display rules and organisational-related antecedents. This study takes a fresh perspective to propose how acting deriving from job engagement is related to employee burnout. Emotional intelligence is modelled as a moderator in these relationships.

The current study focuses on customer contact employees who are currently employed within the banking industry located in the United States of America. Participants of the study were recruited using panel data through Qualtrics both symmetrical and asymmetrical methods were employed in this study to test the proposed relationships.

The findings show that, prior to including EI in the analysis, job engagement was negatively related to surface acting but positively related to deep acting. However, when EI was entered in the equation, the relationship between job engagement and deep acting became negative. EI was also negatively related to both surface and deep acting. EI significantly strengthens the emotional labour process of engagement towards emotional labour strategies as well as lessening burnout. The asymmetrical analysis offer more insights to the proposed relationships.

This study employs both symmetrical and asymmetrical methods to examine emotional labour, emotional intelligence and employee burnout. In particular, job engagement proposed as an antecedent to acting strategy is novel. The study offers some novel insights into emotional labour and emotional intelligence research. The findings have practical implications for HR practitioners and management in the service organisations.

This study aims to test the mediating effect of cross-selling behavior (CSB) on the relationship between sales manager feedback (i.e. output and behavioral) and sales performance, and the moderating effect of emotional labor (i.e. deep and surface acting) on this relationship.

The authors used two-wave multisource data: survey and objective sales performance (sales revenue) data collected from 300 door-to-door salespeople working at a South Korean cosmetics company.

The relationship between output feedback and sales performance was mediated by CSB. In addition, the positive relationship between output feedback and CSB was weakened by deep and surface acting, whereas that between behavioral feedback and CSB was strengthened by deep acting. Specifically, behavioral feedback had a positive relationship with CSB when salespeople engaged in a high level of deep acting. This relationship was not significant for low and medium levels of deep acting. The authors’ supplementary analyses indicated no significant three-way interaction effect between output feedback, behavioral feedback and emotional labor on CSB.

Data collection from door-to-door salespeople in a single cosmetics company undermines the generalizability of the present findings.

By exploring the boundary conditions that strengthen or weaken the effectiveness of manager feedback, this study provides insights into how the two types of manager feedback can be effectively used to promote CSB and sales performance.

This study offers a nuanced understanding of the relative roles of output and behavioral feedback in CSB and the differential moderating effects of emotional labor on the two types of manager feedback.

Coronavirus (COVID) has had a massive impact on the health systems of many nations including Australia. Nurse leaders have, as part of their leadership and management roles, had to manage the emotional responses of the people around nurse leaders . The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of nurse leaders who have held management roles during the health services crisis that has resulted from the COVID pandemic and to look at the emotional work nurse leaders have engaged in and the impact emotional work has had on nurse leaders' emotional well-being.

The study adopted a social constructionist approach and employed unstructured interviews to generate data.

The findings demonstrate that the nurse leaders were experiencing increased emotional exhaustion, which could be construed as a breach of psychological safety, as nurse leaders engaged in more surface acting. This has negatively impacted their lives outside of work. The study recommends that nurse leaders receive support through counselling and reflective practice activities. Consideration also should be given to renumerating nurse leaders appropriately for the emotional work nurse leaders perform.

The structural issues endemic in the industry need to be addressed. Human resource management professionals, senior managers and hospital boards are charged with ensuring that the organisations are safe and healthy workplaces. This includes addressing issues that impact psychological health. If nurse leaders must undertake work that impacts negatively on nurse leaders' mental well-being and personal lives, then appropriate safeguards need to be put in place. The scope of the study was small, as the study is limited by the number of interviewees, the number of study sites and the sites' geographical location. Consequently, limited claims are made about the generalisability of the findings or the findings' transferability to other contexts.

The findings overwhelmingly support the contention that we need to support nurse leaders in the vital role they play through engaging in surface acting in the workplace. The role needs to be recognised and valued as a critical part of the nurse leader role. The contribution the role makes to the welfare of others in the organisation needs to be acknowledged. Given the emotional and personal price that nurse leaders play for surface acting, organisations need to provide genuine support in the form of counselling and the introduction of opportunities for reflective practice.

The study suggests that nurse leaders need to be paid for emotional labour (EL) generally and surface acting in particular. The recognition of the value of caring work must go beyond symbols such as the Year of the Nurse and be rewarded financially.

The experience of nurse leaders using surface acting has received little attention and this is the first study to look at this particular phenomenon during COVID.

This paper aims to discuss the effect of frontline employees' emotional labor (surface acting vs. deep acting) on customer satisfaction and the moderating role of responsibility attributions in the situation of robot service failure.

The scenario-based experimental method was designed to perform hypothesis testing and SPSS was used to analyze the data from the 363 questionnaires collected.

The results indicate that (1) employees' emotional labor recovery has a double-edged sword effect. Deep acting improves customer satisfaction, while surface acting undermines the effectiveness of service recovery and leaves customer satisfaction below previous levels. (2) Customers' responsibility attributions for service failure moderate the effect of service recovery.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to focus on the role of frontline employees' emotional labor in robot service failure contexts, which not only enriches and expands the relevant literature in this domain, but also deepens the understanding of how emotional labor and responsibility attribution effect the customer satisfaction.

This study examines how and under what conditions jobs involving surface acting as key employee performance requirements induce work–family conflict (WFC) and thus negatively impact employees' family lives. Drawing from stress theories, the authors modeled emotional exhaustion as a mediator and trait anxiety and education level as moderators in the surface acting–WFC relation.

Applying the time-lagged design, the authors collected data from 203 service sector employees whose jobs involved frequent interactions with customers. The authors assessed surface acting, trait anxiety and level of education at time 1, emotional exhaustion at time 2 and WFC at time 3 with a three-week time lag between each wave.

The study results confirmed that surface acting drained the emotional energies of the employees who on reaching homes were not able to attend to their family needs, thus experiencing WFC. The authors also found that employees who were high in trait anxiety and education level suffered most from emotional exhaustion and WFC.

To mitigate the harmful effects of surface acting, organizations should ensure that their employees who must perform surface acting have sufficient time off from their roles, such as regular breaks, free evenings and vacations to prevent emotional exhaustion. The authors further recommend hiring only those customer care candidates who have low tendencies to be anxious while interacting with customers.

This study integrates and extends both the emotional labor and WFC literature. This research answers the earlier calls for research on the effects of personality on WFC. Contrary to the expectation, the study reveals that a higher level of education does not buffer the impact of emotional exhaustion on WFC; it rather intensifies the harmful effect of emotional exhaustion on WFC.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an exhaustive review of emotional labor research from the hospitality and tourism literature by outlining the theories, the antecedents and the outcomes of emotional labor, as well as the underlying mechanisms (i.e. mediators and moderators) of emotional labor.

This study provides a qualitative and critical review of emotional labor research from the hospitality and tourism literature, providing insights into the trends and gaps in the literature.

The conservation of resources theory and affective event theory are the two most common theories in the reviewed literature. Emotional intelligence and personality are the most commonly investigated antecedents while burnout and job satisfaction are the most investigated outcomes of emotional labor. Stress and burnout are the most examined mediators of emotional labor and subsequent outcomes, such as commitment, turnover intentions and well-being. Moderators include leader-member exchange, job position, gender and climate of authenticity.

Four major gaps for research and practice are identified as follows: the lack of an overarching theoretical framework; inconsistency in how emotional labor is defined and measured; the vast majority of emotional labor studies are cross-sectional studies; and no research examines potential interventions to help service employees engage in effective emotional labor strategies.

This review offers a model providing a comprehensive framework that outlines the various antecedents, outcomes, mediators and moderators of emotional labor and corresponding theories for future research.

This paper's aim is to study a neglected relationship: testing the impact of emotional labor on the work exhaustion for samples of emergency medical service (EMS) professionals.

Three distinct samples of EMS professionals, i.e. emergency medical technician (EMT) – basic, EMT – intermediate, and paramedic, were surveyed to test the impact of three variable sets, personal (e.g. gender, age, health), work‐related (e.g. years of service, job satisfaction), and emotional labor (i.e. surface acting, deep acting) on work exhaustion.

Results across the three samples consistently showed that surface acting had a significantly stronger positive impact than deep acting on work exhaustion. In addition it was found that surface acting had a significantly stronger negative relationship to job satisfaction than deep acting. Surface acting also had a significant negative relationship to perceived health. Years of service were positively related to work exhaustion across all samples, while job satisfaction was negatively related.

Work exhaustion is an occupational risk for EMS professionals. Individuals considering EMS as a career must have realistic expectations and information about the rewards as well as challenges facing them. To help buffer the impact of emotional labor on work exhaustion and related outcomes, EMS stakeholders should consider facilitating mentor and/or peer support group programs to enhance the development of stronger camaraderie in different EMS‐based organizations (e.g. hospitals, fire services).

Prior research has not tested for the impact of emotional labor on work exhaustion for EMS professionals. Even after controlling for personal and work‐related variables, surface acting maintained a stronger positive impact than deep acting on work exhaustion. Key demographics for each of the three samples (type of work, community size, gender) indicate representativeness to previous cohort samples of nationally certified EMS professionals.

Drawing on the perspectives of emotional labor, self-concept and impression management, this study presents two major findings: (1) employees' excessive reliance on impression management can bother supervisors, and (2) the effectiveness of impression management depends on how the management affects targets' attribution of characteristics to actors.

The study uses a cross-sectional design and a sample of 259 employees to investigate the antecedents of abusive supervision and, in this regard, the potential mediating effects of impression management. Through Mplus analysis, the authors specifically show that deep acting and surface acting affect impression management and that impression management activates abusive supervision.

Emotional labor is critical in triggering abusive supervision through impression management. The study specifically shows that impression management mediates two types of relationships: (1) the relationship between deep acting and abusive supervision, and (2) the relationship between surface acting and abusive supervision. The findings contribute to the abusive supervision literature by clarifying how impression management functions.

This study, by addressing how emotional labor is a potential antecedent of abusive supervision, reveals that impression management can be a mixed blessing, insofar as emotional labor can contribute to abusive supervision.