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The purpose of the current chapter is to meta-analytically examine the nomological network around emotional labor. The results show that negative display rules, high level of job demand, frequent contacts with customers, and lack of autonomy and social support are significantly related to surface acting, whereas display rules, opportunities to display various emotions, and frequent, intensive, and long time contacts with customers are significantly related to deep acting. Further, people high on negative affectivity and neuroticism are more likely to surface act, whereas people high on positive affectivity and extraversion are more likely to deep act. In addition, surface acting is mainly associated with undesirable work outcomes, whereas deep acting is mainly related to desirable work outcomes.

This chapter addresses how emotional labor relates to effort; an important mediator in the relationship between emotional labor strategies and important outcomes. To better understand how effort functions in these relationships, a new way of understanding emotional labor strategies is considered. This new approach accounts for effort profiles associated with different types of emotional labor. Consequently, three distinct categories of emotional labor strategies emerge; cause-focused, symptom-focused, and avoidance actions. These new categories are contrasted with the current dichotomous understanding of emotional labor strategies; surface and deep acting. How these three distinct sets of emotional labor strategies are specifically related to effort – and thus to outcomes of interest – is discussed and propositions are made. The implications of, and avenues for future research afforded by this new categorization of emotional labor are discussed.

Previous research on emotional labor has typically been conducted at the individual level of analysis, despite the fact that many organizations have incorporated work teams into their business model. The use of work teams turns emotional management into a group task on which employees work as a collective. The present chapter proposes a conceptual model that describes the antecedents and consequences of team-level emotional labor. We propose that work groups often impose positive display rules (express integrative emotion) and negative display rules (suppress differentiating emotions) on their members. Positive display rules generally trigger group-level deep acting, whereby teammates seek to change their internal feelings. Negative display rules generally trigger surface acting, whereby teammates retain their actual emotions but do not actually express differentiating feelings. These two dimensions of emotional labor, for their part, impact emotional exhaustion. Deep acting one's positive emotions lowers emotional exhaustion and surface acting increases it. We discuss the consequences of our model for workplace behavior, such as performance. We also discuss how the relationships involving emotional labor change when one considers these constructs at the group-level of analysis.

In this chapter, we develop and present the Multi-Perspective Multilevel Model of emotional labor in organizations. This model is based on three perspectives: (1) a service requirement, (2) an intra-psychic process, and (3) an emotional display, each involving five levels of analysis: within-person, between persons, in interpersonal exchanges, in groups, and across the organization as a whole. Our model is differentiated from earlier characterizations of emotional labor in that we propose that the phenomenon begins with energy generation instead of energy depletion; and is neither a one-way nor a one-by-one service episode. We further proffer that the intra-psychic processes embedded in emotional labor represent a form of social self-regulation that impacts across multiple levels within service organizations. We conclude by discussing the implications and limitations of our model for emotional labor research.

This diary study tested some propositions to determine the effect of discrete emotions on three dimensions of emotional labor and their consequent effect on leaders and follower’s perception about leaders’ authenticity.

The data were collected from a cohort of city traffic police consisting 69 police officials at four different time points between their two shifts using experience sampling method. The data were analyzed using the latest technique known as latent growth curve modeling.

The statistical results demonstrated that negative emotions were negatively associated with deep-acting and three forms of emotional labor did not significantly affect followers’ perception about leaders’ authenticity. This study also demonstrated that surface-acting is not significantly associated with leaders’ self-perceived authenticity, but genuine-acting and deep-acting were negatively associated with leaders’ self-perceived authenticity.

This study also offers certain implications for policing officials for improve authentic behavior through daily emotional displays in policing organizations.

This study offers some practical implications for policing officials about emotion regulation strategies during policing practices with respect to the authentic sense of the leaders as well as the followers.

This study offers an insight about how emotional labor affects the perceptions of policing officers about the authenticity of their leaders in the context of traffic police.

The chapter summarizes existing conceptualizations of emotional regulation and extends existing organizational behavior literature that focuses on emotional labor by the introduction of two processes new to the literature: emotional contagion exchange (ECX) and emotional restorying of labor. More specifically, emotional restorying may allow employees to cope with emotional contagion by converting surface-level acting to deep-level acting, in ways which benefit both employees and organizations. In explaining this process, this chapter constructs a model of multiple interplaying processes.

Display rules are formal and informal norms that regulate the expression of workplace emotion. Organizations impose display rules to meet at least three objectives: please customers, maintain internal harmony, and promote employee well-being. Despite these valid intentions, display rules can engender emotional labor, a potentially deleterious phenomenon. We review three mechanisms by which emotional labor can create worker alienation, burnout, stress, and low performance. Though not as widely discussed, emotional labor sometimes has propitious consequences. We discuss the potential benefits of emotional labor as well.

This chapter explores the effect of service employees’ trait authenticity on customer satisfaction as mediated by work engagement, surface acting, and perceived authenticity. Data were collected from service employee–customer dyads. The results indicate that employees’ work engagement and surface acting mediate the effect of trait authenticity on customers’ satisfaction and perception of authenticity. Trait authenticity is positively related to work engagement and negatively related to surface acting. Evidence that authenticity is desirable in service roles suggests that organizations should consider this characteristic as a significant factor in selection and placement of service employees.

Based on a study of 523 medical sales representatives, the present study investigates the relationships among employees' perception about organizational image, organizational support, and the way they perform their emotional labor during customer interaction. As predicted, the study found support for a positive relationship of both perceived organizational support and perceived external prestige with the way in which employees perform emotional labor. The study further found the importance of perceived external prestige of the organization in influencing the relationship between perceived organizational support and emotional labor. Implications of the study to practitioners and researchers were discussed.

The aim of the research reported in this article was to develop a conceptual model that links emotional labor strategies performed by service employees to a number of relevant antecedents as well as to a variety of customer outcomes. We link emotional labor directly to the customer domain by examining how customers experience and react to emotional displays of service employees. Thus, we expand current emotional labor research which has predominantly focused on employee and organizational outcomes but has offered limited theoretical guidance as to how customers may be directly affected by emotional labor in the service delivery process. Specific research propositions are developed that offer insight into the antecedents and potential impact of emotional labor strategies on customer behavior. Managerial and research implications as well as avenues for future research are discussed from the perspective of emotional labor theory.