Emotional Labor and Service Sabotage in the Hospitality Industry: The Mediating Role of Emotional Exhaustion

This study explored the relationships among two emotional labor types (surface acting and deep acting), emotional exhaustion, and service sabotage, and examined the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion on the emotional labor–service sabotage relationship. The proposed study model was tested using data collected from 323 frontline employees in 10 international tourist hotel restaurants in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling was used to examine our hypotheses. The empirical results indicate that (i) surface and deep acting has significant positive and negative influences on emotional exhaustion, respectively; (ii) emotional exhaustion has a positive and significant relationship with service sabotage; and (iii) emotional exhaustion has a complete mediating effect on the surface acting–service sabotage relationship but a partial mediating effect on the deep acting–service sabotage relationship.