Investigating the Impact of Emotional Labor on Customer's Satisfaction in Hotel Industry: The Mediating Role of Employee Satisfaction

Along with increasing development of service economy and competition in hotel industry, emotions accompanied with labor have become important within this industry. Surface and deep acting are considered as the strategies for emotional labor, through which people try to control their own emotions in the workplace. Therefore, present research has been carried out with the aim of studying and examining the impact of emotional labor on customer's satisfaction through the mediating role of job satisfaction in hotel industry. Population of the study consists of employees and customers of 4 and 5 star hotels in Tehran. In order to obtain sample size, Simple Random sampling way was applied and 385 were selected. This research is regarded as an applied study in terms of purpose and is a descriptive survey in terms of data collecting. In order to analyze data, structural equations' modeling was used. Findings showed that employees' job satisfaction and deep acting have a significant impact on customer's satisfaction. Surface and deep acting have also a significant impact on customer's satisfaction through job satisfaction while surface acting has no significant impact on customer's satisfaction By considering this fact that deep acting has a different mechanism in adjusting emotions compared to surface acting, Hotels may consider required training plans for employees to strengthen deep acting strategies, through which they can offer effective deep acting. So, in this way, they can increase costumers’ satisfactio