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Spillover Effects of Emotional Labor in Customer Service Encounters Toward Coworker Harming: A Resource Depletion Perspective
Author(s) -
Deng Hong,
Walter Frank,
Lam Catherine K.,
Zhao Helen H.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
personnel psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.076
H-Index - 142
eISSN - 1744-6570
pISSN - 0031-5826
DOI - 10.1111/peps.12156
Subject(s) - emotional labor , psychology , social psychology , perspective (graphical) , spillover effect , ego depletion , emotional exhaustion , service (business) , id, ego and super ego , burnout , business , marketing , self control , clinical psychology , economics , microeconomics , artificial intelligence , computer science
This research examines how the implications of emotional labor can transfer from customer encounters to coworker interactions using temporally lagged data from a sample of frontline service employees. The results show that surface acting in customer service encounters is positively, and deep acting is negatively, related to ego depletion. Employees’ ego depletion, in turn, is positively associated with their interpersonally harmful behavior toward coworkers. Hence, ego depletion appears as a mediating variable that translates the implications of distinct emotional labor strategies into coworker harming. Moreover, emotion regulation self‐efficacy moderates the role of surface acting. The positive indirect relationship between surface acting and coworker harming, via ego depletion, is buffered among employees with higher emotion regulation self‐efficacy. These findings shed new light on the complex and far‐reaching consequences of emotional labor. We demonstrate the relevance of emotional labor to third parties not directly involved in customer service encounters and highlight important mediators and boundary conditions of these indirect relations.