This study examines how emotional intelligence and occupational commitment have a moderating effect on the relationship between emotional labour and its potential outcomes. Two acting strategies reflect emotional labour, namely surface and deep acting, with burnout and performance as the prospective outcomes. Burnout is operationalized into emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and diminished personal achievement; whereas performance is operationalized into task performance and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB). The study investigates employee responses from several tourism and hospitality organizations in Florida, USA. The results show that emotional labour relates most positively to task performance and to burnout in the case of surface acting. Tests of moderation show that occupational commitment enhances performance outcomes by facilitating emotional labour strategies, and the prevalence of higher emotional intelligence amongst employees reduces burnout. These findings contribute to the literature on emotional labour by incorporating emotional intelligence and occupational commitment as moderators and by incorporating OCBs within performance analyses.
Emotional labour (EL) has been discussed extensively in the relevant literature, consistent with the importance of services to the economy and the increasing application of dramaturgical perspectives to the study of customer interactions. Defined by Hochschild (1983) as managing emotions through surface or deep acting by following organizational display rules in return for a wage, EL designs provide a means of enhancing task performance and a strategy for the effective management of service encounters through appropriate acting. Various researchers (Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002, Mann and Cowburn, 2005 and Surana and Singh, 2009) have reached broad agreement that deep acting leads to task effectiveness; whereas surface acting has negative consequences. However, a conceptual study by Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) argued that both acting strategies executed by frontline employees in service roles may lead to unfavourable outcomes by triggering negative connotations such as emotive dissonance and self-alienation. Drawing on this study, the present paper re-examines the relationship between emotional labour and the two most cited outcomes for frontline roles in the service context, namely performance and burnout.
Despite its likely effect on employee performance, EL is widely acknowledged as having detrimental effects on the workforce including burnout (e.g., Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002, Johnson et al., 2007 and Montgomery et al., 2006. Given that EL commonly forms part of the job descriptions of frontline employees, the factors facilitating the EL process should be identified in order to improve employee performance and ameliorate unfavourable consequences. Such factors are generally referred to as moderators (Baron and Kenny, 1986). Previous research has been primarily focussed on the antecedents and consequences of EL. The present study sheds lights on EL research by examining the remedy (moderator) with a view to enhancing the applicable outcomes.
Adopting a social identity theory perspective, Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) have indicated that individuals tend to “act” appropriately by conforming to organizational display rules in identifying with their occupations. An introverted salesperson may for example, act in an extrovert manner in order to achieve sales effectiveness when identifying with the selling role. Witt's (1993) study shows that occupational identification has a positive effect on the level of commitment that is shown, which indicates greater commitment on the part of those who identify strongly with their occupations. These studies show that occupational commitment may moderate EL and its performance outcome.
EL Proponents argue that appropriate acting by frontline employees when dealing with various personal encounters enhances organizational effectiveness. Such encounters are emotionally loaded, particularly in the case of dealings with unreasonable and emotional customers (Daus and Ashkanasy, 2005). The employees are under a strong compulsion to “act” hard in order to make customers satisfied, often leading to negative consequences. The prevalence of emotional skills on the part of employees (or labourers), may facilitate the service transaction by managing and regulating emotional encounters, thus lessening potentially negative outcomes. Hartel et al., 1999 note that customer-contact employees who possess greater emotional intelligence manage service encounters more effectively. Emotional intelligence offers the prospect of facilitating either EL acting strategy and lessening its negative consequences.
Consistent with the discussion noted above, the current study proposes occupational commitment and emotional intelligence as moderators and examines their prospective moderating effects on EL outcomes. In particular the research explores the effect of occupational commitment on the relationship between EL and job performance, and the effect of emotional intelligence on the relationship between EL and burnout. Job performance is operationalized into task and contextual performance and burnout into emotional exhaustion, diminished personal achievement and depersonalization. The proposed relationships are outlined in Fig. 1. The following section provides a review of the relevant literature and a rationale and hypotheses to support the proposed model.
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Fig. 1.
The study model: Emotional labour as the predictor, performance and burnout as the outcome variables, and emotional intelligence and occupational commitment as the moderators.
