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The purpose of this paper is to test whether self-verification striving serves as an individual difference antecedent of emotional labor and explore whether various emotional labor tactics acted as mediating mechanisms through which self-verification striving relates to employee outcomes.

The sample used in this paper consisted of supervisor–subordinate dyads working in six hotels in South Korea and used multi-level analyses and the Monte Carlo method to test the research hypotheses presented in this paper.

Self-verification striving was positively and directly related to job performance as well as two out of three forms of emotional labor (i.e. the expression of naturally felt emotions and deep acting). Self-verification striving also indirectly related to job satisfaction through the expression of naturally felt emotions and indirectly related to job performance through deep acting.

The findings of this paper suggest that organizations should consider self-verification striving as an employment selection criterion and provide training programs to help their customer service employees engage in appropriate types of emotional labor.

This paper is the first to explore the underlying mechanisms through which self-verification striving relates to employee outcomes. It also empirically bolsters the notion that expressing naturally felt emotions is an important means of authentic self-expression that positively contributes to job satisfaction. Further, the authors found that self-verification striving positively relates to job performance partially through deep acting. Moreover, they have shown that self-verification striving, as an individual differences variable, is an antecedent of different types of emotional labor.

This paper aims to examine the effect of employees’ emotional labor on work engagement and boundary-spanner creativity based on the job demands-resources model from the perspective of salespeople.

To analyze the data, a confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling procedure using LISREL 8.5 were used. Next, the conditional process modeling was fitted to test the moderated mediation hypotheses.

The analysis results showed that deep acting has a positive effect on work engagement, whereas surface acting has a negative effect, indicating that work engagement of sales representatives is differently related to each factor of emotional labor. Second, work engagement of salespeople has a positive effect on boundary spanner creativity. Next, entrepreneurship has a moderate effect in the relationship between emotional labor and work engagement with customer stewardship and has a positive moderating effect in the relationship between work engagement and boundary spanner creativity.

Considering the positive effect of boundary spanner creativity on work engagement, it is important to maintain interaction with customers, including adaptive behaviors and customer orientation, as customers’ demand increases. The individual competence and capability of salespeople such as entrepreneurship are directly related to interaction with customers, so when the right strategy is defined for each type of entrepreneurship of salespeople, it will create a positive corporate culture and lead to performance improvement.

Compared with most studies, more direct factors of emotional labor were assessed to detect positive effects in this study. More specifically, when salespeople were forced to fake their feelings, they were more likely to recognize stress or burnout due to emotional dissonance between what they really felt and what they had to express to comply with organizational regulations.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between surface acting (SA), deep acting (DA) and organizational commitment (OC).

Guided by affective events theory, the study adapted emotional labour scale and three components model to profile 373 teachers from 30 schools around Peninsular Malaysia. A list-based simple random sampling technique was used to select respondents. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test hypotheses, and the proposed model was assessed through renowned fit indices.

OC was hypothesized as a second-order construct. SEM result indicates that both SA and DA have significant negative relationship with OC. Fit indices of the hypothesized model showed χ²/df ratio (560.069/265) = 2.113, RMSEA (0.055), and CFI (0.936). This result provides empirical support for the data collected.

The study provides new insight on the ongoing debate about SA and DA. Therefore, it advances body of research in this regard. The implication for HR managers is that strategic polices can be institutionalized to buffer the consequences of SA and DA. This is due to the fact that SA and DA may not be abolished for service employees like teachers. The practical implication for teachers is the understanding that emotional regulation process is inevitable because teaching is profoundly an emotional activity job. Besides being a cross-sectional study, the sampled population may have limited the study’s outcomes.

Given existing inconsistent results on the consequences of SA and DA, this study shows that not only SA can lead to negative after-effects, DA can also cause the same. Future study can explore spiritual intelligence to examine how best SA and DA can be performed at reduced consequences on OC.

The authors systematically review empirical dyadic service encounter research published in top-tier journals between 1972 and 2022.

The authors employed bibliometric techniques, co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling analysis to map schools of thought and research frontiers within the dyadic service encounter literature. In total, the authors analyzed 155 articles. To ensure inclusion of high-quality research, the authors screened articles from 139 journals with “4” or “4*” ratings on the 2021 Chartered Association of Business Schools (ABS) journal list, in addition to articles published in three service sector-specific journals: Journal of Service Management, Journal of Services Marketing and Journal of Service Theory and Practice.

The authors' co-citation analysis identified four distinct clusters within the dyadic service encounter literature: (1) shaping and explaining service encounters; (2) emotions in service work; (3) modeling, manipulating and measuring encounter service quality and (4) emotional labor and regulation in dyadic service encounters. Furthermore, the authors' bibliographic coupling analysis generated three research clusters: (1) service encounter characteristics; (2) emotions and emotional labor and (3) service encounter interaction content.

The authors' comprehensive review synthesizes knowledge, summarizing similarities among research clusters within the service encounter realm. Noteworthy are research clusters that clarify the emotion-based underpinnings and reciprocal nature of behaviors and emotions within dyadic encounters. By conducting complementary bibliometric analyses, the authors trace the evolution of the service encounter literature, providing an overview of the present state of dyadic service encounter research. These analyses offer valuable insights into the current landscape of the field, identifying future dyadic service encounter research opportunities.

The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, big data and biometrics will bring opportunities for a wide range of innovations that have the potential to dramatically change service industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential role service robots will play in the future and to advance a research agenda for service researchers.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service, robotics and AI literature.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it provides a definition of service robots, describes their key attributes, contrasts their features and capabilities with those of frontline employees, and provides an understanding for which types of service tasks robots will dominate and where humans will dominate. Second, this paper examines consumer perceptions, beliefs and behaviors as related to service robots, and advances the service robot acceptance model. Third, it provides an overview of the ethical questions surrounding robot-delivered services at the individual, market and societal level.

This paper helps service organizations and their management, service robot innovators, programmers and developers, and policymakers better understand the implications of a ubiquitous deployment of service robots.

This is the first conceptual paper that systematically examines key dimensions of robot-delivered frontline service and explores how these will differ in the future.

With the advent of increasingly sophisticated AI, the nature of work in the service frontline is changing. The next frontier is to go beyond replacing routine tasks and augmenting service employees with AI. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether service employees augmented with AI-based emotion recognition software are more effective in interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) and whether and how IER impacts their own affective well-being.

For the underlying study, an AI-based emotion recognition software was developed in order to assist service employees in managing customer emotions. A field study based on 2,459 call center service interactions assessed the effectiveness of the AI in augmenting service employees for IER and the immediate downstream consequences for well-being relevant outcomes.

Augmenting service employees with AI significantly improved their IER activities. Employees in the AI (vs control) condition were significantly more effective in regulating customer emotions. IER goal attainment, in turn, mediated the effect on employee affective well-being. Perceived stress related to exposure to the AI augmentation acted as a competing mediator.

Service firms can benefit from state-of-the-art AI technology by focusing on its capacity to augment rather than merely replacing employees. Furthermore, signaling IER goal attainment with the help of technology may provide uplifting consequences for service employee affective well-being.

The present study is among the first to empirically test the introduction of an AI-fueled technology to augment service employees in handling customer emotions. This paper further complements the literature by investigating IER in a real-life setting and by uncovering goal attainment as a new mechanism underlying the effect of IER on the well-being of the sender.