Emotional Labor And Burnout: The Moderating Role Of Job Commitment

Many studies on Emotional labor have been done during the past 20 years in western organizational behavior research fields and Chinese researchers have now become interested in it as well. Emotional Labor has important effect on jobs which contact people frequently, as teachers, salesperson and so on. As we all known, teachers, salesperson have to face students, customers all day ,they can easily get emotional problems. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the circumstances of emotional labor about these special jobs as teachers, salesperson. On the basis of the domestic and foreign relevant research and literatures of emotional labor, The study explored the relations among emotional labor, burnout and job commitment with the methods of interview, questionnaire survey, Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis, and Regression Analysis. The study obtained conclusions as follows:Firstly, emotional labor is composed of four dimensions, they are emotion diversity, emotion expressing rules, surface acting and deep acting.Secondly, teachers and salesperson have the same structure of emotional labor, but some dimensions have different contributions.Thirdly, emotion express requirement has significant negative relevance with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.Fourthly, surface acting has significant positive relevance with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, but deep acting has significant negative relevance with emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and personal accomplishment decreasing.Fifthly, validated the Resource Keeping Theory, therefore deep acting is better than surface acting as a regulating strategy.Sixthly, job commitment can positively moderate surface acting on depersonalization.Seventhly, differences in demographic variables such as gender, age, position and so on, have been found on emotional labor, and burnout.This study explored the emotional labor circumstances of teachers and salesperson, and compared differences of the two careers. Furthermore, the paper combined emotional labor, burnout and job commitment, probed their relationship and the moderating effect of job commitment between emotional labor and burnout.