Emotional Exhaustion Among Hotel Employees: The Interactive Effects of Affective Dispositions and Positive Work Reflection

Abstract

Hospitality employees inevitably face emotional exhaustion when performing their jobs. The purpose of this study was to investigate dispositional antecedents of hospitality employees’ emotional exhaustion, including self-instability, pessimism, and affect variability, and how employees’ affect variability mediates the relations between self-instability and pessimism and emotional exhaustion. In addition, we explored the moderating role of positive work reflection on the relation between affect variability and emotional exhaustion. A total of 224 frontline employees in 18 four- and five-star hotels in Ecuador responded to surveys about their emotions and work lives. The findings suggest that (a) emotional exhaustion was influenced by affect variability, (b) affect variability mediated the relations between self-instability and pessimism and emotional exhaustion, and (c) the relation between affect variability and emotional exhaustion was weakened by positive work reflection. The results highlight the importance of potential low-cost and easily trainable interventions that could help in attenuating the negative effects of highly variable emotions and the resulting exhaustion that are prevalent in the hospitality industry. This research is among the first to examine the dispositional antecedents of emotional exhaustion, and the first to highlight the role of positive work reflection as a moderating variable that can buffer the negative effect of affect variability on emotional exhaustion.

Corporate social responsibility, employee engagement, well-being and the task performance of frontline employees

“…In particular, this study expands previous CSR research (Korschun et al, 2014) by proposing engagement and well-being as MD 59,8 core outcomes of CSR initiatives from a frontline employee's perspective. In the service industry, in particular, frontline employees are more likely to become exhausted, stressed and burned out because they must control their emotions while interacting with customers (Kokt and Ramarumo, 2015;Xu et al, 2018;Zhao and Ghiselli, 2016). Thus, engagement and wellbeing should be considered as critical components of attracting and managing talented frontline employees in a sustainable manner (Manente et al, 2014).…”

What if Employees Brought Their Life to Work? The Relation of Life Satisfaction and Work Engagement

“…The theoretical support for the relevance of nonwork-related feelings and attitudes in understanding work-related feelings and attitudes could be found in the dispositional perspective [34,35]. According to this perspective, general affective states (in this case, nonwork or life affective states) tend to spill over into evaluations of work-related dimensions, such as feelings and attitudes like work engagement [36][37][38]. An affective disposition can be understood as the inclination to react to external or environment events in an affect-based manner [35].…”

Impacts of Job Standardisation on Restaurant Frontline Employees: Mediating Effect of Emotional Labour

“…Additionally, Maslach et al [39] present EE as a person's inability to meet the emotional demands of a job over an extended duration. Xu et al [40] suggest that identifying the EE context will enable hospitality managers to address the problem of why employees remain exhausted and complain about their jobs. Furthermore, the stressful settings that FLEs face in their jobs will adversely affect their JS, defined as employees' emotional state and affective responses to their jobs [41].…”