Employee Emotional Labor In Service Enterprises

The emotional labor refers to the process of modifying one's own emotion and expression to make it consistent with the organizational or occupational display requirements(Grandey,2000).Nowadays,the emotional labor has been an important component of the employee work in service enterprises,especially in hotel,catering and other high customer-contacted tourism service enterprises,where the front-line employees are required to conduct emotional labor even more frequently,and also required to express friendly,enthusiastic and positive emotions and depress negative emotions that they are facing and experiencing in workplace,so as to create a good service atmosphere and improve the customer satisfaction.Thus,how to manage the emotional labor and guide the employees to show deep acting in their emotional labor process has become a focus in emotional labor research fieldService is completed in the process of interpersonal interaction.Both the external customer-employee relationship and the internal employee-organization relationship are closely connected with the employee emotional labor,which will influence the employee emotional labor no matter whether the relationship express smooth or difficult.Among the existing literatures,the research from the perspective of customers mainly concentrated on how to effectively improve the customer satisfaction,lack of exploring the influence of customers'behaviors by reverse thinking.The research from the perspective of employees themselves mainly concentrated on employee's personality characteristics,lack of examining the influence of the employee's interior force from a cognitive perspective.The research from the perspective of organizations mainly concentrated on organizational situation factors,ignoring the discussion on the influence of leader as a most important interpersonal interaction factors.In addition,the current researches were mostly conducted by questionnaires while seldom in experiments.Therefore,based on the employee emotional labor,this paper centers on the relationship chain of "customer-employee-organization" and adopts the methods of grounded theory analysis,questionnaires and experiments to deeply explore the 4 influencing factors of service enterprise's employee emotional labor from 3 perspectives of customers(the customer injustice),employee identity(the social identity and role identity)and organization(the leader emotional labor).This paper is divided into 5 parts with a total of 8 studies to explore the employee emotional labor.The 1st part is the preliminary research,including 1 study.The study 1 uses the depth interview and grounded theory analysis to construct the causal model of employee emotional labor,which provides an theoretical basis to further explore the influence on employee emotional labor from the customer aspect,individual aspect and organizational aspect.The 2nd part is to explore the influence of customer injustice on employee emotional labor from the reverse perspective of customer aspect,including 2 studies The study 2 uses questionnaires to examine the influence of customer injustice on employee emotional labor.The study 3 uses experiments to explore the buffer conditions in the influencing process of customer injustice on employee emotional labor,which is expected to answer how to reduce the negative effects of customer injustice on employee emotional labor.The 3rd part is to explore the influence of multiple identities(social identity and role identity)on employee emotional labor from individual aspect,including 2 studies.The study 4 uses questionnaires to examine the influence of social identity and role identity on employee emotional labor.The study 5 uses experiments to explore the influencing paths of different social identity levels(industry identity and hotel identity)on employee emotional labor,which is expected to answer how the interior forces of social identity and role identity influence the employee emotional labor and their influencing paths.The 4th part is to explore the influence of leader emotional labor on employee emotional labor from organizational aspect,including 2 studies.The study 6 uses questionnaires to examine the cross hierarchical influence of leader emotional labor on employee emotional labor.The study 7 uses experiments to explore the influencing conditions of leader emotional labor on employee emotional labor,which is expected to answer what influence that the leader emotional labor will have on the employee emotional labor.The 5th part is to explore the comprehensive influence of customer injustice,employee identity and leader emotional labor on employee emotional labor,including 1 study,which is expected to answer the relationship of the 3 aspects and how these factors influence the employee emotional labor.Through the above 8 studies,this paper concludes the following main conclusions:(1)The causal model of employees' emotional labor in Chinese enterprises background is basically consistent with the existing oversea emotional labor research results,but also emerges some new factors and factors that have not been paid enough attention to.(2)The customer injustice will increase the difficulty of employees in complying with the emotional rules,and leads the employee to conduct more surface acting and less deep acting,which is more significant to those who with strong mistreatment sensitivity.(3)When the employee provides customer service with colleagues together,the pressure from customer injustice will get buffer,which will influence the employee emotional labor strategy as well.(4)Both the social identity and role identity will promote the employee deep acting and reduce the employee surface acting.And there exits some promotion or transformation relationship between the social identity and role identity.(5)Different levels of social identity are all beneficial to improve the employee self-esteem and self-efficacy,and also beneficial to promote the deep acting and reduce the surface acting through the employee self-esteem.(6)The leader surface acting influences the employee surface acting but does not influence the employee deep acting,and the leader deep acting influences the employee deep acting but does not influence the employee surface acting.(7)The inappropriate leader surface acting is easier to trigger the employee surface acting,and the appropriate leader deep acting is easier to promote the employee deep acting.(8)Among the 4 influencing factors of customer injustice,social identity,role identity and leader emotional labor,the leader surface acting has the strongest influence on employee surface acting,while the employee role identity has the strongest influence on employee deep acting.Meanwhile,the employee role identity has partial mediating effect between the influence of customer injustice on both employee surface acting and deep acting.This paper is helpful to carry forward the theoretical research of emotional labor in China,enrich the existing emotional labor research achievements,enhance the Chinese service enterprises' attention and understanding to employee emotional labor,and provide the Chinese service enterprises with theoretical direction and practical paths to properly guide and manage the employee emotional labor.