The Effect Of Emotional Labor On Job Satisfaction: The Moderating Role Of Supervisory Support And The Mediating Role Of Affective Commitment

Emotional labor has been becoming a more popular field for researchers of organizational behavior. The main point of this paper is to test the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction and explore the psychological mechanism that how emotional labor effect the job satisfaction. The data are collected using cross-sources questionnaire survey responses from 250 supervisor-subordinate dyads of service industries. At last, we use Amos and Multilevel analysis to analyze the data and get following conclusions:(1) Exploring emotional labor scale by factor analysis, we can get three dimensions of emotional labor strategies: surface acting, deep acting and the expression of naturally felt emotions.(2) Three emotional labor strategies have different effect on affective commitment and job satisfaction. Surface acting has significant negatively effect on affective commitment and job satisfaction; deep acting has significant positively effect on affective commitment and job satisfaction; the expression of naturally felt emotions has significant positively effect on affective commitment and job satisfaction.(3) The relationship between emotional labor and affective commitment is positively moderated by supervisory support. The negatively effect of surface acting on affective commitment is lower when supervisory support is high; the positively effect of deep acting on affective commitment is higher when supervisory support is high; the positively effect of the expression of naturally felt emotions on affective commitment is higher when supervisory support is high.(4) The effect of emotional labor on job satisfaction is mediated by affective commitment. When employees use surface acting, they will show low affective commitment and then lead to lower job satisfaction; when employees use deep acting, they will show high affective commitment and then lead to higher job satisfaction; when employees expressing of naturally felt emotions, they will show high affective commitment and then lead to higher job satisfaction.