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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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how salesperson’s emotional intelligence (EI) influences salesperson behaviors (i.e. emotional labor strategies) and the influence these behavioral strategies have on customer’s outcomes.

The study develops a conceptual model using past literature and tests hypotheses using a salesperson-prospective customer dyadic sample. To participate in the study, 224 salespeople and their potential customers were recruited from three different companies.

Results reveal the importance of conceptualizing the dimensionality of a salesperson’s EI ability, as different dimensions impact customer outcomes differently. Additionally, the importance of salesperson’s authentic emotional labor strategies is highlighted.

EI is a foundation for successful selling in a business-to-business environment, but it is not a silver bullet. Sales managers and recruiters should use assessment tools to evaluate sales recruit’s EI, but it is also critical to train salespeople to engage in deep acting, creating authentic emotions in the buyer-seller relationship.

Using a dyadic sample, this study suggests that the dimensions of EI and emotional labor strategies influence customer’s perception of salesperson’s trustworthiness and propensity to continue the relationship with the salesperson differently. Specifically, not all dimensions of salesperson’s EI is found to be positive, and only salesperson’s authentic (deep) emotional strategies are found to influence customer outcomes positively.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the roles that service employees’ responses to high job demands play in service innovation, by examining the effects that service employees’ motivational orientation in self-regulation (regulatory focus) and their emotional labour strategy have on their creativity.

By integrating regulatory focus theory and emotion regulation theory, the authors developed a theoretical model to propose the links between promotion and prevention regulatory foci, different emotional labour strategies and frontline employee creativity. The research hypotheses were tested using hierarchical linear model based on data collected from 304 frontline employees and 72 supervisors in 51 restaurants.

The results showed that promotion focus was positively related to frontline employee creativity while prevention focus was negatively related to it. In addition, both emotional labour strategies (deep acting and surface acting) mediated the effect of promotion focus on frontline employee creativity. Surface acting mediated the effect of prevention focus on frontline employee creativity.

This is the first research conducted to explain, from a self-regulatory perspective, the influence that is exerted on service employees’ service innovation by their responses to high job demands. The findings identify the effects that service employees’ promotion focus or prevention focus in self-regulation have on their creativity, and the data unravel the role of emotional labour strategy as the mediating mechanism that explains the influence of regulatory focus on service employee creativity. On the basis of the findings, managerial directions are offered with regard to managing service employees’ regulatory focus and emotional labour, with a view to enhancing the creativity and innovation within a service organisation.

The existing research on service climate emphasizes its benefits for customers, employees and organizational outcomes. Service climate translates into organizational expectations from service employees to continuously show appropriate emotions when engaging with clients. However, these expectations may also take a toll on employees, who need to regulate their emotions using emotional labor strategies in order to conform to the organization’s expectations. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the service climate and employees’ use of emotional labor strategies, and investigate how service employees’ service knowledge, skills, abilities and other attributes (KSAOs) affect this relationship.

In two separate studies, one with a sample including 100 nurses working in 15 wards, and the other comprised of 244 luxury hotel chain employees working in 39 departments, participants were surveyed about their perceptions of the service climate and their use of emotional labor strategies. In addition, each participant’s direct manager assessed his/her service KSAOs.

Results demonstrated a positive association between the service climate and the use of surface emotional labor strategies for employees who had limited service KSAOs.

Organizations may choose to hire service employees based on their service-related KSAOs and develop training and development programs for those who have fewer capabilities in these areas. In addition, organizations may want to rethink the traditional climate-induced emotional display rules and emphasize instead more authentic service encounters in order to lessen the toll that service climate takes on certain employees.

While service climate depicts the core values and beliefs of the organization about service, and helps employees to translate them into behaviors that promote high service performance, the current paper points to a potential toll it may have on employees well-being due to their use of surface emotional labor strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how chronological age and work experience affect emotional labor strategies (i.e. deep acting and surface acting) through emotional intelligence (EI).

Structural equation modeling analysis provided support for the hypotheses based on a sample of 256 flight attendants working for four South Korean airlines.

The results showed that chronological age has a positive effect on both surface and deep acting. The study also found that work experience has a negative influence on surface acting, whereas it has a non-significant effect on deep acting. In addition, the investigation suggests that EI mediates the relationship between work experience and deep acting.

The current study will add to the growing body of research on emotional labor by examining the effect of chronological age and work experience on emotional labor strategies through EI.

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 examine the observing customer’s reactions, namely, gratitude, loyalty to the employee and tipping intention while observing other customer incivility during another customer service failure and the frontline employee’s emotional labor strategy.

A 2 (emotional labor strategy: deep acting vs surface acting) by 2 (service consumption criticality: high vs low) experiment is used to test the hypotheses.

The results reveal that observing an employee’s deep acting emotional labor (vs surface acting) leads to a greater level of gratitude among the affected customers and promotes their tipping and loyalty to the employee. However, there is no significant interaction effect of service consumption criticality and emotional labor strategy on customer gratitude.

This research builds upon the social servicescape, customer misbehavior and emotional labor literature by examining previously untested relationships.

In cases of other customer service failure, managers should effectively communicate to their employees how their emotional labor induces positive customer feedback. Currently, emotional labor is emphasized mostly regarding its negative effects on employees, but this research suggests that serving the recovery expectation of the affected customers, especially when it is served with authentic emotional displays, can promote increased tipping and loyalty behavior.

No research investigates customers’ emotional and behavioral reactions to employee emotional labor in the context of other customer service failure.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the emotional labor strategies of service employees differently influence the level of their creativity, and whether creative employees consequently benefit from that creativity in terms of achieving a high level of job performance.

The authors surveyed flight attendants from an airline in South Korea. The authors distributed 150 questionnaires to flight attendants, received 126 responses, and finally obtained 119 usable data. The authors used Mplus 7.13 to evaluate validity and test the hypotheses.

Whereas employees using deep acting were found to be less emotionally exhausted and more affectively committed toward their organization, which produced a high level of creativity, those who selected surface acting were shown to suffer more emotional exhaustion and have less affective commitment, which generated a low level of creativity. Customer service personnel behaving creatively resulted in superior official job performance appraisals.

This study makes distinct contributions to the literature by proposing emotional labor as the key antecedent of employee creativity in service organizations, by confirming emotional exhaustion and affective commitment as the motivational mechanisms through which emotional labor strategies influence service employee creativity, and by suggesting the value of employee creativity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between emotional labor, emotions, and job satisfaction among nurses, and explore the mediating role of emotions in the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction.

A cross-sectional study was designed with 168 nurses in Korea. Structural equation modeling and path analysis were performed to analyze data.

Surface acting correlated positively with anxiety and frustration. Deep acting correlated positively with enjoyment and pride but correlated negatively with anxiety, anger and frustration. Enjoyment and pride correlated positively with job satisfaction; anger correlated negatively with job satisfaction. Deep acting correlated positively with job satisfaction, while surface acting did not show a significant relationship. Enjoyment, pride and anger mediated the relationship between deep acting and job satisfaction.

This research expands empirical findings on nurses’ emotional experiences, by considering their discrete emotions rather than general affect. It is the first study to empirically examine the relationships between emotional labor, discrete emotions and job satisfaction, as well as the mediating role of emotions in the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction in the nursing field. The mediating role of emotions suggests that not only nurses and nurse managers but also hospital administrators should take nurses’ emotions into account to increase nurses’ well-being and their job satisfaction. Finally, differential influences of surface acting and deep acting on nurses’ emotional experiences and job satisfaction highlight the need for practical interventions to promote the use of deep acting among nurses.

This study confirms the mediating role of emotions in the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction in the nursing field. It encourages future research to pay greater attention to nurses’ emotions themselves along with emotional labor. Findings add an interdisciplinary aspect to research on nursing by assimilating psychological perspectives of emotion and emotion management research to this field.

The current study aims to examine the antecedents and outcomes of emotional labor strategies (i.e. surface acting and deep acting) among service employees in China. The study proposed employees’ perceived closeness with customers and customers’ socioeconomic status will predict deep acting and surface acting, respectively. It further examined the mediating role of emotional labor between perceived customer attributes and employee well-being (i.e. burnout and job satisfaction).

One hundred and one employees at a jewelry store in China completed a survey regarding their perceptions of customers, use of emotional labor and well-being (e.g. job satisfaction and burnout). Correlational and regression analyses were conducted to examine the predictors and outcomes of different emotional labor strategies.

Perceived closeness with the customer group predicted employees’ use of deep acting, whereas perceived customer socioeconomic status did not predict the use of surface acting. Deep acting was negatively related with burnout, whereas surface acting did not predict burnout. Deep acting mediated the relationship between perceived closeness with customers and burnout.

To maintain employee well-being, organizations can promote a service climate to enhance employees’ perceived relationship with customers.

The study specifies the interpersonal context in which employees use different emotional labor strategies; the perceived closeness with customers predicts less burnout via the use of more deep acting. This study also supplements the existing research on emotional labor based on a Chinese sample; deep acting predicts employee well-being.