The influence of customer orientation on emotional labour and work outcomes: a study in the tourism industry

How service employees express their emotions with customers is an important part of service quality. However, the emotional expressiveness of contact employees can be affected by the importance they give to customers and can have consequences on their work attitudes and wellbeing. This study aims to explore the influence of customer orientation in emotional labour strategies and analyses the impact of emotional labour strategies on four outcomes: burnout, affective delivery, job satisfaction and affective commitment. The sample consisted of 283 contact employees from hotels and travel agencies. The results show that organisational customer orientation promotes the expression of genuine emotions and that individual customer orientation fosters both deep acting and expression of genuine emotions. The study reveals that while surface acting promotes both emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation, deep acting promotes affective commitment. Finally, it is shown that the expression of genuine emotions fosters personal accomplishment, affective delivery, job satisfaction and affective commitment. Findings provide insight for organisations and managers about the importance of customer orientation in management of emotions in customer service and how can have positive implications on employees and on the quality of service.