Emotional Labor: Individual-Level Links and Temporal Aspects

Emotional labor concerns the management of feelings to produce appropriate emotional displays for the purpose of work. The present thesis distinguishes between three levels at which the causes of emotional labor can be identified, and contributes to knowledge about the role of hitherto unexamined antecedents at each of these levels, as well as the flow on effects to relevant outcomes of emotional labor. At a between-person level, the majority of the emotional labor literature considers how distal variables lead to emotional labor; however, the effect of more proximal between-person motivational variables has received less attention. Within-person, episodic factors such as customer mistreatment and coworker support as well as dynamic factors such as serial positioning and trends over time are theoretically plausible causes of emotional labor that have not received enough attention. In this thesis, I present four studies that examine the relationship between emotional labor and its antecedents and outcomes, at each of these levels. In the first study, I test the effects of between-person differences in goal orientation on emotional labor, showing that individuals with high learning orientation are more likely to use deep acting as mediated by deep acting self-efficacy, whereas people with high performance goal orientation tend to use both emotional labor strategies as mediated by deep and surface acting self-efficacy. In the second study, I show that episodic customer mistreatment and coworker support jointly influence emotional labor and emotional exhaustion, including their rates of growth over time. Furthermore, surface acting mediates the negative link between customer mistreatment and employee wellbeing, while coworker support buffers the detrimental effect of surface acting on emotional exhaustion. Finally, in the third and fourth studies, I demonstrate the importance of dynamic-level effects by showing how serial position of emotional labor strategies and time-based trends in emotional labor influence customer satisfaction. Specifically, the positioning of deep acting at the end of an interaction and switching from surface to deep acting during an interaction lead to higher customer satisfaction. Switching from deep to surface acting predicts the lowest customer satisfaction. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are also discussed