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Emotional labor has been defined as the regulation of both feelings and expressions to support the display rules promoted by an organization and its goals (Zhan et al., 2016; Grandey, 2000). With a strong focus on customer service, employees in the hospitality and tourism industry engage in emotional labor to comply with organizational display rules and successfully uphold a service-oriented culture for customers. With organizations focusing on service quality interactions between customers and employees and growing research interest in organizations’ attempts to manage and direct employee emotional displays, literature examining the impact and influence of emotional labor has gained interest since the early 1990s (Morris and Feldman, 1996).
Emotional labor overlaps with several theories and constructs: emotion regulation, emotion regulation strategies, emotion management and impression management (Grandey and Gabriel, 2015; Grandey and Melloy, 2017; Mallory and Rupp, 2016; Mesmer-Magnus et al., 2012). However, over the years, three main camps of emotional labor theory have helped define and clarify emotional labor, and its antecedents and outcomes. First, Hochschild (1983) argued that service occupations are characterized with having frequent interactions with customers; therefore, employees must not only manage emotions but also have their emotions enforced and supervised by management. These conditions facilitate employees engaging in emotional labor. Hochschild (1983) further theorized that emotional labor is demonstrated through two mechanisms: surface acting and deep acting. Employees engage in surface acting by suppressing their negative emotions and displaying anticipated positive expressions, resulting in emotional dissonance between what employees feel and display. In contrast, employees engage in deep acting by altering their feelings to evoke genuine positive emotions. By engaging in surface and deep acting as strategies to regulate their emotions, employees perform emotional labor to comply with organization display rules (Brotheridge and Lee, 2002).
Second, Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) expanded on Hochschild’s (1983) definition by including spontaneous and genuine emotion and the impact emotional labor can have on task effectiveness. Although deep and surface acting are emotional labor strategies used to comply with display rules, employees can also spontaneously feel emotions that are in-line with display rules without having to change their emotions. For example, a front-desk employee might already be feeling positive and happy, and therefore, their emotional display is already in-line with the display rules...