Service Climate And Front-line Employees Emotional Labor:the Mediating Role Of Excellent Service Role Identity

In service industry, it is very important to improve customers’perception of service quality. In order to survive and develop in the fierce competition, and the customers’perception of service quality is heavily depended on the frontline service employees’work. Making appropriate emotional expression is an important part of the frontline employees’job, and it will have a major impact on the experience and evaluation of customers. Therefore, scholars pay more attention to employees’ emotional labor. In order to guide the emotional labor of employee, scholars are very concerned about which elements can influence it. After combing and summarizing the previous research carefully, we found that although the researches of antecedents of emotional labor are abundant, but most of them focused on individual factors, studies that focus on organizational factors are very limited, even more rarely empirical researches, and most studies did not explain in detail causal mechanisms underlying these relationships.To fill the gaps within existing research, this paper proposes that service climate can help to shape the role-identity of excellent service, which can guide employee express emotion appropriately. Our theoretical basis is role-identity theory. Considering the maintenance of role-identity depends on the context, this study examines how customer unfairness influences the mediating effect of the role-identity of excellent service. We use date from 186 service employees to examine the relationship between service climate and employees’ emotional labor. We also examine the mediating effect of role-identity of excellent service and the conditional indirect effects when customer unfairness exists. Through effective data analysis, this study demonstrates that:(1) There is a significant positive relationship between service climate and deep acting, (2) The role-identity of excellent service plays a full mediating role in the relationship between service climate and deep acting.There are two main innovations of this study:(1) it builds a model of service climate influencing employees’emotional labor and the empirical results show that perceived service climate affects the formation of excellent service role-identity positively and facilitate employees to present more deep acting. This conclusion is the elaboration and application of role identity theory in the service context and it provides a new perspective for future research on work role identity of front-line service employees. (2) this paper explores and confirms that perceived situational factors by employees (service climate) and individual role identity (excellent service role-identity) have a positive impact on employees’ emotional labor. This conclusion enriches the existing research on emotional labor’s antecedents and provides new ideas to explain the occurrence and process of emotional labor.Finally, based on explaining research results, this study provides some useful suggestions for service supervisors to guide employees’ emotional labor effectively, such as creating positive service climate to facilitate employees’ emotional labor and selecting and cultivating appropriate service employees to facilitate service work. In addition, this study points out the limitations and future research directions.