The Relationship Between Emotional Labor And Life Satisfaction

With the rapid development of service industry today, emotional labor, as a special form of labor, has been widespread concerned in academic circles. Although previous researches were mostly confined to the work field, in recent years, the phenomenon in service industry such as "high divorce rate" and "labor shortage" in our country have all reflected the impact of its working characteristics on employees’ family and personal life. Up to now, there’s been rarely studies on the effect of emotional labor on family, and all of them were under the background of western culture. In the current environment in China, it remains to be studied the explanatory power of emotional labor influencing on family. Around this theme, our study involved376valid subjects in the questionnaire survey to answer following problems..In study1, we investigated the characteristics of employees’ emotional labor in service industry in China. Through comparing the differences of four variables, ie. emotional labor, emotional exhaustion, work-to-family conflict and life satisfaction, on demographic variables, we investigated employee’s characteristics of emotional labor and its relevant variables. According to the results, emotional labor, emotional exhaustion, work-to-family conflict and life satisfaction were different on the demographic variables. Surface playing does not exist significant differences on gender, women’s deep playing was significantly higher than men on emotional exhaustion and work-to-family conflict, while men’s life satisfaction was higher; Older people using more emotional labor strategy had higher life satisfaction; Highly educated ones use more emotional labor strategy and had higher work-to-family conflict with lower emotional exhaustion; Telephone customer service staff had most surface playing, with nurses having most work-to-family conflict; Employees of middle position owned the highest life satisfaction.Study two verified the influence of emotional labor on work-to-family conflict, and discussed the influence mechanism, further examining the mediating role of emotional exhaustion under the background of Chinese culture. Based on this, we continued promoting the results to individual life level, studying the effect mechanism of emotional labor on employee life satisfaction and the sequence mediating role between emotional exhaustion and work-to-family conflict. The results showed that, the surface playing can significantly positively predict work-to-family conflict, with emotional exhaustion partially mediating the process; Finally, emotional exhaustion and work-to-family conflict played the sequence mediating role between surface playing and life satisfaction.Study three, intermediary model to investigate the influence of gender on life satisfaction in the role of emotional labor. The results found, male’s surface acting in the work will affect the work family conflict, but will not affect the life satisfaction; and women’s surface acting at work can increase the emotional exhaustion and increase the work-to-family conflict, and ultimately affect their life satisfaction.Finally, we analyzed the limitations and prospects basing on the results of our study, to provide valuable suggestions to management practice.