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Suppressing and faking emotional expressions depletes personal resources and predicts job strain for customer-contact employees. The authors argue that personal control over behavior, in the job and within the national culture, provides compensatory resources that reduce this strain. With a survey study of 196 employees from the United States and France, the authors supported that high job autonomy buffered the relationship of emotion regulation with emotional exhaustion and, to a lesser extent, job dissatisfaction. The relationship of emotion regulation with job dissatisfaction also depended on the emotional culture; the relationship was weaker for French customer-contact employees who were proposed to have more personal control over expressions than U.S. employees. Theoretical and research implications for the emotion regulation literature and practical suggestions for minimizing job strain are proposed.

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Does a smiling employee make a difference? Do men and women evaluate emotional cues differently in a commercial service setting? Previous work suggests that positive affective displays influence customer responses to service encounters, yet the impact of gender on these evaluations remains unclear. The main objective of this study was to examine whether men and women respond differently to positive and negative affective displays in brief, mundane service encounters. Consistent with North American gender stereotypes and process focus, women in this study were less satisfied than men with negative emotional displays during an otherwise smooth service exchange. Conversely, in process failure situations, negative affective displays had a double whammy impact on men participants’ satisfaction ratings. The implications of these findings to service managers are briefly discussed.