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This paper aims to explore service encounters from a social behavior perspective. By proposing that employees’ emotional labor strategies are influenced by customer displays of emotion, this paper answers calls to investigate the reciprocal nature of service interactions and the importance of taking both customers and service providers into account when delivering high-quality service is the goal.

The sample consisted of 121 dyads of customers and service employees from hairstyling salons. Data were collected from observations of the customers’ emotional displays, self-report surveys administered to the service employees measuring strategies of emotional labor and self-report surveys administered to the customers to assess their rapport with the service providers and their loyalty intentions.

Length of acquaintance was positively related to customers’ positive display, which mediated the relationship between length of acquaintance and employee-customer rapport. Customers’ positive display was negatively related to employees’ deep acting (i.e. modifying inner feelings) but not to surface acting (i.e. modifying superficial expressions). Customers’ positive display and employees’ surface acting were related to loyalty intentions through the mediation of rapport.

This study provides a better understanding of the customer’s role as the target, and a possible cause of emotional regulation among service employees. It underscores the role of service relationships in customers’ emotional behavior and customer-related outcomes.

This paper aims to draw attention to the need for a nuanced view of the emotional contagion framework. It proposes and empirically tests a refined model of emotional contagion and its effects in the hotel sector by focusing on the front-desk service encounter interactions.

Data were collected from three separate groups of paired informants: receptionists, hotel customers and interaction observers. The sample included 573 full customer service interactions in 47 hotels in Catalonia. The model was tested with structural equation modelling.

Emotional contagion has specific mechanisms at the hotel front-desk. No relationship was found between receptionists’ inner mood and their outwardly displayed emotions. Yet, receptionists’ displayed emotions enhance customer mood, and, largely, customer satisfaction. Ultimately, this affects customer behavioural intentions. It was also discovered that guests are able to clearly distinguish between their satisfaction with the specific service encounter at the front desk and the overall satisfaction with the hotel stay. The positive effects of employees’ displayed emotions are of particular importance in lower-star hotels and are less important at the high end. Perceived training opportunities have a positive effect on customer satisfaction and improve the employee-displayed emotion.

Researchers should examine employee outcomes that are more stable than mood, but may enhance or be related to the effective display of emotions at the front desk, such as employee satisfaction and commitment. In general, emotions and behaviours of employees and consumers should be further examined in other services across the hospitality industry, in different cultural contexts and in terms of their impact on company performance. Researchers should heed the precise type of mechanism that takes place in each service context.

The hotel management should focus their efforts on ensuring positive emotional performance, regardless of employees’ inner mood. Managers should carefully interpret differentiated results according to whether they have been drawn from overall satisfaction or customer service interaction surveys. The training provision is of particular importance in lower-star hotels, where customer outcomes depend more on employee-displayed emotion.

This study empirically corroborates that customer outcomes of front-desk services are linked to receptionists’ displayed emotions, and not to employees’ feelings. Onsite data collection, multiple-informant approach, paired dyads and structural equation modelling hold a great potential for study designs that seek insights into interpersonal phenomena in hospitality services research.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether emotional deviance in response to customer aggression and employees’ feelings of anger is likely to be influenced by perceived job autonomy. To date, studies on emotional labor have focused primarily on emotional regulation strategies. Little is known about the factors that may serve to increase emotional deviance (i.e. situations in which felt and expressed emotions match but are at odds with organizational display rules).

Three samples of service workers were recruited from northern Israel, and data were collected using self-reported questionnaires. Research hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression analyses.

Study 1 revealed that under conditions of frequent exposure to customer aggression, more perceived job autonomy was associated with more frequent instances of emotional deviance. The results of Study 2 and Study 3 demonstrated that the relationship between anger and emotional deviance was stronger for employees reporting high levels of perceived job autonomy.

Given the potentially negative impact of emotional deviance on customer satisfaction, organizations should find a balance between satisfying employees’ desire for control and discretion and ensuring employee compliance with display rules.

This study contributes to the existing literature by pointing out that job autonomy may have a “dark side”, in the sense that it provides employees with a certain level of perceived freedom, which might then be extended to include freedom from rule compliance, especially when negative emotions are experienced.

The concept of emotional labor refers to the management of emotions in interaction with customers. This study aims to suggest an integrative definition of emotional labor. It develops a conceptual framework that helps organize and synthesize key insights from the literature, in an interactional and multi-level perspective.

This integrated framework consists in a mapping of key research themes resulting from a systematic literature review, which includes research in sales and marketing. As critical affective processes in sales have not been studied sufficiently, both in business-to-business and business-to-customer selling, this review also incorporates works in other research fields.

Sales representatives’ emotional labor must be considered as a bi-directional interaction with the customer in a multi-level perspective. Moreover, emotional labor has rather negative consequences for the salesperson (e.g. burnout and job stress), but may have positive sales and customer outcomes. Findings suggest that the expression of genuine emotions should be used during sales interactions. In addition, organizations should prevent customers’ negative behaviors (e.g. mistreatment).

Emotional labor key practical implications with regard to several management functions such as the recruitment, performance management and training (Ashkanasy and Daus, 2002) of the sales representatives.

Research on emotional labor in a sales ecosystem is scarce. It has largely covered service industry employees in contact with customers, but has not paid enough attention to sales representatives (Mikeska et al., 2015). The proposed integrated framework concerning emotional labor focuses on the bi-directional interaction between the sales representatives and their customers.

Prior theoretical research focuses primarily on inauthentic emotional displays during the enactment of service roles, in the form of emotional labour, with little attention paid to factors that promote genuine emotional expressions during employees’ customer interactions. The purpose of this paper is to propose a model in which employee trust in the supervisor leads to more authentic emotional displays. Supervisors’ positive and negative affectivity constitute antecedents of this trust.

To analyse the data, collected from supervisors and employee–customer dyads, this study used hierarchical linear modelling.

Trust in the supervisor relates to authentic emotional displays in service encounters, according to both employees’ self-reports and customers’ evaluations. Supervisors’ positive affectivity relates positively to employees’ trust; trust mediates the relationship of affectivity with employees’ authentic emotional displays.

Positive supervisor affectivity and employee trust in the supervisor influence employee authenticity, and customers notice employees’ authenticity during service encounters.

This study advances understanding of the factors that enhance employees’ authenticity in service interactions while also contributing to understanding of the role of the supervisor in service organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of employee-displayed smiling on customers’ affective states (pleasure, arousal, and dominance) and satisfaction. Building on the stimulus-organism-response framework and theories of emotional contagion and feelings-as-information, the main hypothesis was that a smiling (vs non-smiling) employee significantly increases customer satisfaction through the mediating influence of pleasure.

The study used a quasi-experimental two-group between-subjects design. A total of 210 customers at a large retail bank had a brief service encounter at the store entrance with a smiling (vs non-smiling) bank teller. Customers then went into the bank to do what they came to do. Before leaving the bank, customers completed a survey that included demographic information, affect (pleasure, arousal, and dominance), and measures of customer satisfaction.

A smiling (vs non-smiling) employee had a significant positive impact on customer satisfaction. This effect was mediated by pleasure, but also, to a weaker extent, by dominance. These results contradict previous claims that smiling-induced emotional contagion does not remain throughout the completion of a service encounter.

Managers should encourage, and potentially train, employees to act in ways associated with positive emotions. Managers could also hire employees based on how good they are at acting and expressing themselves in a genuinely positive manner and create a pleasant store atmosphere so that the feelings and behaviors displayed by frontline employees are genuine rather than inauthentic.

This is the first experimental field study to examine the isolated effect that employee-displayed smiling has on customers’ affective states and satisfaction. The results provide more direct evidence for the psychological processes justified by emotional contagion and feelings-as-information theories. Furthermore, the finding that dominance mediates the smiling-satisfaction link has never been shown before.

We examine whether supervisor support and empathy moderate the relationship between customer injustice and employee display rule deviance through a reduction in employee anger.

Working adults (N = 214) completed an online survey assessing their experiences with customer injustice, feelings of anger, and the extent to which they deviated from emotional display rules over the past month. Participants also completed a measure of trait anger (a control variable), and they rated their supervisor’s general support and empathy.

Supervisor empathy (but not supervisor support) buffered the relationship between customer injustice and employee anger. In turn, reduced employee anger is related to lower display rule deviance. Country (United States vs. India) also moderated the effect of anger on display rule deviance; the relationship was stronger in India than in the United States.

Service industry employees typically are expected to regulate their emotional displays by displaying positive emotions and hiding negative emotions. Meeting these display rules is considered paramount to providing good service. Unfortunately, customers sometimes treat service employees in a disrespectful or unfair manner, and the resulting employee anger may cause employees to break emotional display rules. It is difficult to control customer behavior, but our results suggest that empathetic managers may help employees manage the negative emotions that result from customer mistreatment. Thus, selecting and training managers to show empathy may improve customer service by resulting in more resilient employees.

Many service industries are facing severe labor shortages. As a result, service providers are turning to new sources of labor, such as service robots. Critics however often point out that service robots lack emotional communication capabilities without which they cannot be expected to truly replace human employees and fill the emerging labor market gaps. Here, a research agenda for the investigation of the role of emotional communication by service robots and its effects on customers and their service experience are laid out. This paper aims to propose that research in this area will further understanding of how service robots can add value to service frontlines, engage customers, increasingly replace service employees and ultimately help overcome pressing labor shortages.

A research agenda structured around the three-step emotional communication process (i.e. read, decide and express) and the four emotional communication strategies crucial for service interactions (i.e. mimicking, alleviating, infusing and preventing) are conceptualized.

Three contributions are made. First, the importance of emotional communication by service robots during service interactions is highlighted. Second, interdisciplinary research priorities and opportunities in this emerging field are mapped out. Third, a theoretical structure to connect the findings of future studies is provided.

Service research investigating the role and implications of emotional communication by service robots is scarce. A research agenda to guide the exploration of this crucial, yet underresearched component of customer-robot service interactions is structured and mapped out.

Despite recognition of the importance of emotions and emotion regulation in service encounters, emotion regulation has been generally studied from an employee perspective. This study investigated customer emotion regulation behaviours (CEREBs) in face-to-face service encounters; arguing for a more nuanced approach through an emotion regulation matrix representing the playing up and downplaying of positive or negative emotions. Motivational factors and service-related situational conditions that influence the likelihood of emotion regulation were also examined.

Four focus groups and the critical incident technique method were used to obtain data from people who had interacted with service employees within the previous six months.

There was support for emotion regulation in the four facets of the emotion regulation matrix. Five CEREB dimensions, including verbal behaviours and facial expressions, were evident. Motivational factors and situational conditions that impacted on customer emotion regulation in service encounters were also identified.

The findings were based on two qualitative methods. A quantitative approach should be used to further validate the suggested framework.

Most research on emotion regulation has focused on employees. We examined the phenomenon from a customer viewpoint and in a service encounter context. As customers are not bound by employment rules and conventions, a wider range of emotion regulation behaviours were found. The study used the four-faceted emotion regulation matrix to investigate this, developing a conceptual framework that provides a foundation for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how emotion display rules are influenced by relational, occupational, and cultural expectations.

The authors compare these influences by assessing anger and happiness display rules toward customers, coworkers, and supervisors across four cultures.

Overall, the findings suggest that anger can be expressed with coworkers, can be slightly leaked to supervisors, but must be almost completely suppressed with customers. In contrast, happiness expression is most acceptable with coworkers. Moreover, though culture dimensions (i.e. power distance and collectivism) do predict display rules with organizational members, display rules with customers are fairly consistent across culture, with two exceptions. French respondents are more accepting of anger expression with customers, while American respondents report the highest expectations for expressing happiness to customers.

The results support that several countries share the “service with a smile” expectations for customers, but these beliefs are more strongly held in the USA than in other cultures. Thus, importing practices from the USA to other culturally distinct countries may be met with resistance. Management must be aware of cultural differences in emotions and emotion norms, as outlined here, to improve the experience of employees of globalized service organizations.

The authors integrate social, occupational, and cultural theoretical perspectives of emotional display rules, and build on the small but growing research identifying variation in display rules by work target, specifically speaking to the globalized “service culture.”