Research Paper
The Effects of Emotional Labor on Employee Work Outcomes
Kay Hei-Lin Chu
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy In Hospitality and Tourism Management
Suzanne Murrmann, Chair Pamela Weaver John Williams Kusum Singh Kent Murrmann
May 23rd, 2002 Blacksburg, Virginia
Keywords: Emotional Labor, Service Acting, Work Outcomes Copyright 2002, Kay H.Chu
The Effects of Emotional Labor on Employee Work Outcomes
Kay Hei-Lin Chu
(ABSTRACT)
Emotional labor can be defined as the degree of manipulation of one’s inner feelings or outward behavior to display the appropriate emotion in response to display rules or occupational norms. This study concerns the development of an emotional labor model for the hospitality industry that aims at identifying the antecedents and consequences of emotional labor. The study investigates the impact of individual characteristics on the way emotional labor is performed; it investigates the relationships among the different ways of enacting emotional labor and their consequences, and addresses the question of whether organizational characteristics and job characteristics have buffering effects on the perceived consequences of emotional labor, which are emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. This study involves the rigorous development of a 10-item scale, the Hospitality Emotional Labor Scale, to measure the emotional labor that employees perform. The results of the study conformed to a two-factor structure of emotional labor: emotive dissonance and emotive effort. These two dimensions tap three types of service-acting that employees perform: surface acting, deep acting, and genuine acting. The scale was used to survey 285 hotel employees. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and moderated multiple regression (MMR) were employed to examine the proposed model, as well as to test the
Kay Hei-Lin Chu
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy In Hospitality and Tourism Management
Suzanne Murrmann, Chair Pamela Weaver John Williams Kusum Singh Kent Murrmann
May 23rd, 2002 Blacksburg, Virginia
Keywords: Emotional Labor, Service Acting, Work Outcomes Copyright 2002, Kay H.Chu
The Effects of Emotional Labor on Employee Work Outcomes
Kay Hei-Lin Chu
(ABSTRACT)
Emotional labor can be defined as the degree of manipulation of one’s inner feelings or outward behavior to display the appropriate emotion in response to display rules or occupational norms. This study concerns the development of an emotional labor model for the hospitality industry that aims at identifying the antecedents and consequences of emotional labor. The study investigates the impact of individual characteristics on the way emotional labor is performed; it investigates the relationships among the different ways of enacting emotional labor and their consequences, and addresses the question of whether organizational characteristics and job characteristics have buffering effects on the perceived consequences of emotional labor, which are emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. This study involves the rigorous development of a 10-item scale, the Hospitality Emotional Labor Scale, to measure the emotional labor that employees perform. The results of the study conformed to a two-factor structure of emotional labor: emotive dissonance and emotive effort. These two dimensions tap three types of service-acting that employees perform: surface acting, deep acting, and genuine acting. The scale was used to survey 285 hotel employees. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and moderated multiple regression (MMR) were employed to examine the proposed model, as well as to test the
References: 2 Researchers suggested that service employees perform emotional labor using three acting techniques (Hochschild, 1983; Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993) 3 on the behavior of service providers during encounters with customers, and this behavior often strongly affects customers’ perceptions of product quality, both of goods and services (Ashforth & Hamphery, 1993) 5 allow the expression of their characteristic personality traits and values, and thus systematically create social environments consonant with their dispositions (Ickes, Snyder, & Garcia, 1997)