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This study explores how emotional intelligence, customer orientation, deep acting and surface acting influence job satisfaction among middle managers in their interactions with customers, colleagues and business partners. By examining these factors, we aim to provide insights into their collective impact on job satisfaction and interpersonal dynamics within organizational contexts.

By involving 95 middle managers at Indonesian Internet service providers as respondents, this research used a questionnaire to collect data. Next, the data were analyzed using the partial least square-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique, which evaluated measurement models and structural models. A total of twelve hypotheses were tested in this study.

This study found that customer orientation does not have a significant effect on deep acting, thereby nullifying its indirect effect on job satisfaction. Conversely, it's demonstrated that both deep acting and surface acting serve as partial mediators in the relationship between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction. Furthermore, surface acting emerges as a partial mediator in the connection between customer orientation and job satisfaction.

By exploring the relationship between customer orientation, emotional intelligence and job satisfaction among employees, this study seeks to reveal novel insights. The study examines the impact of these critical elements, which are necessary for middle managers to effectively manage their emotions and cultivate significant connections, on their overall job satisfaction and interpersonal dynamics in their diverse responsibilities.

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 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 examine how customer incivility affects service employees’ emotional labor (i.e. surface acting) and the way surface acting augments their emotional exhaustion at work, and in turn, damages customer orientations of service employees.

Using a sample of 309 department store sales employees in South Korea, a two-stage mediation model is used in terms of structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that customer incivility is positively related to service employees’ use of surface acting; this, in turn, results in feelings of emotional exhaustion, which are negatively related to their customer orientation. That is, the findings of this study shows that the negative relationship between customer incivility and service employees’ customer orientation was fully and sequentially mediated by service employees’ surface acting and emotional exhaustion.

The main limitation is the nature of the cross-sectional data the authors used in the analysis. It gives us reason to be very cautious in reaching conclusions concerning causal relationships among variables, since the authors did not capture longitudinal variation.

The research shows that customer incivility has a negative effect on service employees’ customer-oriented behaviors since experiences of customer incivility among emotionally exhausted employees via surface acting generates inadequate and unfair sense-making related to the treatment offered by customers, which increases the tendency of decreasing their effort and loyalty for customers to prevent further loss of emotional resources. Therefore, service organizations should devise appropriate strategies and implement systematic programs for reducing employee exposure to customer incivility, or preventing it altogether.

The current study broadens the conceptual work and empirical studies in customer incivility literature by representing a fundamental mechanism of why customer incivility negatively affects service employees’ customer orientation. The primary contribution of the study is to gain a deeper understanding of how customer incivility leads to lower employee customer-oriented behaviors through double mediating effects of surface acting and emotional exhaustion.

Drawing on the conservation of resource theory and emotional contagion perspective, this study aims to propose that customer mistreatment has an indirect effect on subsequent customer mistreatment by triggering high levels of surface acting. In other words, there is a vicious circle formed as a result of customer mistreatment and surface acting. This paper further argues that emotional regulation and conscientiousness are effective in breaking this vicious circle.

An experience sampling study was conducted on 97 frontline service employees in a hotel chain’s restaurants in China, with two daily surveys for ten consecutive days. Multilevel path analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that employees experiencing customer mistreatment in the morning would adopt the surface acting strategy more frequently in the afternoon, which in turn induces more customer mistreatment in the afternoon. Further, this indirect effect can be mitigated by high (versus low) levels of emotional regulation and conscientiousness.

Recently, there has been growing recognition of the vital links between customer mistreatment and negative employee outcomes. However, these studies have failed to consider the carryover effect of customer mistreatment. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first pioneer study on whether and how customer mistreatment can affect subsequent instances of customer mistreatment, thereby offering a more comprehensive understanding of the consequences of customer mistreatment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore surface acting as a mediator in the relationships between perceptions of organizational politics and personality, with stress, turnover intentions, and job satisfaction.

Data were obtained via survey from 276 working adults, and responses were subjected to structural equation modeling to confirm the measurement model and test hypotheses.

Surface acting was found to mediate the relationships between perceptions of organizational politics and intent to turnover and satisfaction, and between proactive personality and intent to turnover and satisfaction. No mediating effect for surface acting was found between agreeableness and the outcomes.

Individual differences and situational contingencies do affect surface acting in the workplace, and individual work-related outcomes. Managers need to be aware of personality characteristics and situational contexts that impact surface acting in organizations to help understand the effects of potential divergent attitudes and behaviors on employee outcomes.

Previous research examining surface acting assessed behavior in light of employee-customer interactions. This research extends the study of surface acting by examining the mediating role of surface acting among new predictors including organizational politics, proactive personality, and agreeableness with stress, turnover intentions, and job satisfaction.

Service firms increasingly hire employees that work two or more jobs. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory and the notion that employees have finite emotional resources, the purpose of this paper is to examine the consequences of emotional labour among employees who simultaneously work in two service jobs. The authors posit that emotional labour requirements from the primary job (PJ) and secondary job (SJ) interact to emotionally exhaust employees through a process of resource depletion. Specifically, building on extant work, this research tests a theoretical mediation model of surface acting predicting organizational commitment through emotional exhaustion.

Employing a predictive survey approach, 171 frontline-service employees with two jobs from a variety of service industries are surveyed in two waves. The hypothesized model is tested using a bootstrap procedure for testing indirect effects. In addition, the authors investigate first- and second-stage moderation.

Results confirm full mediation of the relationship between surface acting and organizational commitment by emotional exhaustion, confirming that the effect of surface acting on organizational commitment is indirect through emotional exhaustion. In addition, results reveal that surface acting in the SJ moderates the link between surface acting in the PJ and emotional exhaustion, and that employees low on organizational identification congruence display lower levels of organizational commitment with the PJ.

This study contributes to the literature that relates emotional labour to organizational commitment by investigating contingent factors. The key contribution thus pertains to identifying contingent factors based in COR theory and social identity theory that influence the triadic relation between surface acting, emotional exhaustion, and organizational commitment.

Results reveal that surface acting in a second job not just simply adds to the level of employee emotional exhaustion. Instead levels of surface acting in a first and second job interact with each other to affect emotional exhaustion. This finding suggests service managers must take into account if and how employees are enforced to perform surface acting in the other job to prevent high exhaustion.

This study is the first to investigate emotional labour among dual job holders, a growing segment of the service workforce that poses unique challenges to organizations.

The purpose of this study is to empirically test and extend knowledge of the effects of emotional labor of frontline service employee.

The authors examined the effects of emotional labor (surface acting and deep acting) on frontline employee creativity, as well as the mediating effects of different kinds of job stress (hindrance stress and challenge stress) on the relationship between emotional labor and creativity. The research hypotheses were tested using data collected from 416 service employee–supervisor dyads in 82 Chinese local restaurants.

Results show that surface acting is negatively related to and deep acting is positively related to frontline employee creativity; surface acting is positively related to hindrance stress, while deep acting is positively related to challenge stress; and hindrance stress mediates the relationship between surface acting and creativity.

This study extends the consequences of emotional labor to frontline employee creativity from a cognitive perspective. It also advances knowledge about the effects of emotional labor on stress by classifying different kinds of job stress caused by different cognitive appraisals of surfacing acting and deep acting, and revealing the role of hindrance stress as psychological mechanism through which surface acting affects creativity.

One shift in the retail landscape is the workload transfer from the retailer to the consumer. This study aims to explore consumer perceived effort and the consequences of this workload transfer.

Two scenario-based experiments were conducted. Partial least squares modeling was implemented on the experimental survey data to explore how different dimensions of effort (i.e. mental, physical and emotional) and surface acting contribute to perceptions of effort and value.

Surface acting increases consumer effort perceptions. Consumers’ value perceptions decline as perceived effort increases. Effort perceptions attenuate when consumers have a choice. The paper also brings attention to the shortcomings in the current conceptualization of surface acting and perceived effort, and reconceptualizes effort as a formative construct.

This paper cautions marketers about the potential negative implications of shadow work. Service marketers should provide a choice between face-to-face (F2F) and self-service technologies whenever possible. In addition, marketers should develop and implement strategies for reducing consumer surface acting.

This study includes an extended conceptualization and new operationalization of consumer surface acting, revised thinking about measuring consumer effort and a unique approach to accounting for effort perceptions of traditional F2F service vs SST.

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.