Emotional Labor, Emotional Dissonance, And Emotional Exhaustion: The Moderation Role Of Trust In Colleagues

The development of the modern services is one of the important ways to promote China's economic transformation and upgrading,while emotional labor is an important content of service employees' work.To this end,emotional labor of service employees has been receiving more and more attention from scholars and service managers in all walks of life.This paper reviewed related concepts and theoretical models in the research field of emotional labor,constructed a mediation model,named emotional labor-emotional disorders-emotional exhaustion,basing on the existing related research,explored the moderating role of trust among colleagues.A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect some information of frontline service employees' emotional labor and other variables of concern.Descriptive statistics and correlation analyses were used to describe the basic characteristics of service employees' emotional labor,emotional exhaustion and other related aspects.A reliability test,exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to confirm the internal consistency and validity of measures used in this present study.A set of multiple regression models was estimated to verify the hypothesized mediation and moderation models,which especially discussed the mediating role of emotional dissonance between emotional labor and emotional exhaustion,as well as the moderating roles of trust among colleagues on the relationships between employee labor and emotional dissonance and that between emotional dissonance and emotional exhaustion.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)For the mediation models,the results were consistent with the hypotheses: emotional dissonance was positively related to emotional exhaustion;surface acting positively predicted emotional exhaustion not only directly but also indirectly by prompting service employees' emotional dissonance;deep acting negatively predicted emotional exhaustion not only directly but also indirectly by reducing service employees' emotional dissonance;emotional disorder mediated the relationship between employees' emotional labor and their emotional exhaustion.(2)For the moderation models,the moderation roles of trust among colleagues were partially supported: when trust among colleagues was high,the positive relation between surface acting and emotional dissonance became weaker,and the positive relation between emotional dissonance and emotional exhaustion became weaker,too.However,the coefficient of the interaction term of trust among colleagues and deep acting was not significant,which meant that trust among colleagues didn't moderate the relationship between deep acting and emotional dissonance and the negative relation between deep acting and emotional dissonance did not become weak with the increasing of trust among colleagues.