The Spillover Effect of Emotional Labor: How It Shapes Frontline Employees’ Proactive Innovation Behavior

Abstract

Frontline employees can generate tremendous value for both the customer and the organization through innovation. While prior research has revealed that frontline employees’ emotional labor significantly affects their own creativity, it is unclear whether it has a spillover effect on other frontline employees (i.e., co-workers) and how it shapes their behaviors, especially proactive innovation behavior. Based on emotion-as-social-information (EASI) theory, we construct a mechanism model to illustrate this aforementioned spillover effect. By analyzing the questionnaires collected from 268 frontline employees in China, we found that (1) deep acting (surface acting) of co-worker influences frontline employee’s proactive innovation behavior positively (negatively); (2) affective commitment plays a mediating role between emotional labor and proactive innovation behavior; and (3) emotional sensitivity reinforces the positive (negative) effect of deep acting (surface acting) on proactive innovation behavior. The conclusions provide valuable insight into understanding the spillover effects of emotional labor among frontline employees.