Study On The Influence Of Emotional Labor On Service Performance From The Perspective Of Work Autonomy

Under the circumstance of rapid development of the economy and society, the better form of service economy, the Experience Economy, has come into being. The traditional consumption on the products and service has gradually been transferred to the process of experience. Consequently, in order to satisfy the emotional needs of the customers for "gratitude" and "humanity", what the service industry has been selling is not only products or service, but the emotional experience integrated in the related products or service. The concept of emotional labor was first put forward by the American socialist Hochschild in the 1970s. It refers to the behaviors or expressions of the employees who, consciously or unconsciously, control their emotions in order to realize the organizational goals or to meet the organizational needs. Due to the fact that emotional labor is directly related to the performance of the service industry, since the emergence of the concept, many scholars in the academic circles, even the people of the service industry, joined the research on emotional labor. But until now, most researches have still focused on the relationship between emotional labor and service performance. The internal mechanism of how emotional labor influences the service performance has rarely been studied until now. This paper introduces the intervening variable of work autonomy and analyzes the black box issue of emotional labor’s influence on service performance from the perspective of organizational behavior. Besides, as the typical example in service industry, the hotels are emotional intensive enterprises, where there are a lot of emotional contacts and expressions. If the study on the relationship between emotional labor and service performance was carried out among the front-line staff in hotels, it would be very persuasive. Therefore, we have chosen the front-line staff in four four-star hotels in Hefei, Anhui Province as the study objects. On the one hand, as the main force in the hotel industry, the four-star hotels enjoy much market share. So their emotional labor can represent the level of most hotels and has universality. On the other hand, it is a pressing problem for the four-star hotels to understand the core of emotional management and improve the enterprise service quality during the economic transition period. In the meantime, as the representative city in central China, Hefei has witnessed fast development in the hotel industry and have a lot of hotels in building. However, problems of high demission rate and low service efficiency have been haunting the managers in the hotels. The problems caused by the emotional labor of front-line or fundamental staff in the hotels have been exposed. Based on this, it is of great practical meaning and can be a proper proof to choose the front-line staff in the hotels in Hefei as our studying objects. Therefore, in this paper, we have used the approach of handing out questionnaires to collect the data and information of the front-line staff in thefour-star hotels and applied the statistical software including the SPSS 20.0, AMOS and so on to carry out the correlation analysis, factor analysis and regression analysis to explore the relations between emotional labor and service performance as well as among all variables. The following are the results we get:(1) The three-dimensional strategy of emotional labor assets different influence on the dual service performance. The relation between surface expression and dual service performance is not that clear. Further researches are needed to verify such relations. There is a positive correlation between the deep and natural expression and dual service performance.(2)The three-dimensional strategy of emotional labor has different influence on the work autonomy. The correlation between surface expression and work economy is low. The correlation between these two variables hasn’t been verified in this paper. However, there is a positive correlation between deep and natural expression and work autonomy.(3) Work autonomy has played the mediating role when emotional labor influences service performance. During the process, the mediating role of work autonomy is partial in surface expression and task performance. But it does not have mediating effect in contextual performance. Work autonomy has played a partial mediating role in natural expression and service performance.(4) In order to study the statistical differences among all research variables, in this paper, we have used the single factor comparative analysis on gender, marriage, working years, monthly income and education level, etc. The emotional labor, work autonomy and service performance of the hotel front-line staff show differences in gender, marriage, working years, monthly income and education level. For example, the factor of gender did not show any significant differences in surface expression, natural expression, work autonomy, task performance and contextual performance. However, in terms of deep expression, the factor of gender has shown significant differences. This might be caused by the emotional regulation differences between the male and the female:the female are better at regulate inherent emotions. In terms of marriage, there were no significant differences in surface expression, deep expression, work autonomy, task performance and contextual performance. But the factor of marriage has shown a certain degree of significance in natural expression. The front-line staffs with different working periods in the hotels show no significant differences in deep expression, natural expression, work autonomy or contextual performance. However, the differences in surface expression and task performance are significant. The staffs with varied income show no significant differences in deep expression, natural expression, work autonomy, task performance, and contextual performance, but they show significant differences in surface expression. The staffs of different educational levels show no significant differences in natural expression, contextual performance and task performance, while they display significant differences in surface expression, deep expression and work autonomy. After detecting these differences, in this research, we have done multiple comparisons and analysis on such differences to learn about the reasons behind them.At last, according to the research results gained from this paper, we have come up with corresponding solutions for the emotional labor management in hotels. At the same time, we summarized the weakness of the research in this paper and provided some suggestions on possible research prospects.