Emotional Display Rules and Emotional Labor: The Moderating Role of Commitment.

Abstract

The authors examined whether commitment to emotional display rules is a necessary condition for emotional display rules to affect behavior at work. Results using structural equation modeling revealed that display rule commitment moderated the relationships of emotional display rule perceptions with surface acting, deep acting, and positive affective delivery at work, such that the relationships were strong and positive when commitment to display rules was high and weak when commitment to display rules was low. These findings suggest that motivation plays a role in the emotional labor process in that individuals must be committed to display rules for these rules to affect behavior.

Gaming Emotions in Social Interactions

“…On the one hand, such dissociation between inner and outer feelings can have negative physiological and psychological costs, which can reduce employees' wellbeing in the long run (Ashforth 1993;Coté 2005;Gosserand and Diefendorff 2005;Grandey 2003;Hochschild 1983;Morris and Feldman 1996). For instance, there is evidence to suggest that the constant pressure to deliberately fake feelings is negatively correlated with job satisfaction (Grandey 2003).…”

Chinese hotel employees in the smiling masks: roles of job satisfaction, burnout, and supervisory support in relationships between emotional labor and performance

“…Displaying organizationally desired emotions to customers has been argued to be a form of labor because it requires the efforts and the self-control of employees to display emotions that F o r P e e r R e v i e w O n l y 4 they may not necessarily privately feel (Bono, Foldes, Vinson and Muros 2007;Bono and Vey 2007). While the current decade has seen the efforts and skills of employees at expressing organizationally desired emotions at work as the key to success for service industries (Pugh 2001;Diefendorff et al 2005;Gosserand and Diefendorff 2005), little attention has been paid to identifying how employees actually think and react when they display such emotions. How do employees enact such demanding roles?…”

“…Most studies have focused on two emotional labor strategies, namely, surface acting and deep acting, which are commonly used for regulating emotional displays at work. Surface acting involves suppressing felt emotions and faking the desired emotions, while deep acting involves actually experiencing the desired emotions (Grandey 2003;Diefendorff et al 2005;Gosserand and Diefendorff 2005). The aim of using emotional labor strategies is to alter one's emotional displays in order to be consistent with the display rules of one's organization.…”

Customer Perception of Emotional Labor of Airline Service Employees and Customer Loyalty Intention

“…Service employees are the representatives of the service firm. Hence, they have the responsibility to create a favorable image of the company through their emotional displays (Rupp, Holub, & Grandey, 2007 (Gosserand & Diefendorff, 2006). Training the employees is also an effective way to engage them in deep acting so that the customers receive original emotional displays.…”