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In response to 2 areas for development in the emotional labor literature-(a) the contemporaneous associations between emotional labor and affective reactions, and (b) whether emotional labor might be more personally costly for some employees than others-this study tested a conceptual model explaining the differential effects of deep and surface acting on job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion via their asymmetrical influences on mood, and whether extraverts fare better when engaging in emotional labor. As expected, surface acting was positively associated with negative mood, and this explained some of the association of surface acting with increased emotional exhaustion and decreased job satisfaction. Contrary to hypotheses, deep acting was unrelated to job satisfaction and was associated with lower positive affect. Extraversion moderated several emotional labor relationships such that, in general, surface and deep acting had more positive (or less negative) effects for extraverts (compared to introverts). Overall, the results support the importance of considering the roles of mood and disposition in the impact of emotional labor.
Given the ongoing decline of the United States manufacturing industry (Tyson, 2005) and the steadily increasing numbers of people employed in the services sector (Mehring, 2006), it is perhaps now more impor- tant than ever to understand factors that affect the well-being of customer service workers. Over the past 2 decades, the emotional labor literature has explored one set of influences on service worker well-being, namely, the emotion regulation strategies adopted by employees during service en- counters in accordance with organizational expectations for emotional dis- play (i.e., display rules; Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). Emotional labor re- searchers have identified two such strategies (Grandey, 2000; Hochschild, 1983). One - surface acting - involves engaging in a superficial display of the normative emotion without making any effort to change what one is actually feeling. Deep acting, on the other hand, consists of trying to modify felt emotions in order to bring both behavior and internal experience into alignment with expected displays. As Gosserand and Diefendorff (2005) pointed out, these strategies are generally adopted to comply with rules for the display of positive emotions.
In this study, we explore the role of mood in the relationship between emotional labor and well-being. The majority of emotional labor studies have focused on the cumulative impact of...
