Stressful demands or helpful guidance? The role of display rules in Indian call centers

Ethical Leadership as the Reliever of Frontline Service Employees' Emotional Exhaustion: A Moderated Mediation Model

Based on the conservation of resources theory, this study aims to create new knowledge on the antecedents of emotional exhaustion. We explore the internal mechanism and boundary conditions of the impact of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion, using data gathered from 460 frontline service employees at an airport in China. Employees completed questionnaires regarding ethical leadership, emotional exhaustion, organizational embeddedness, job satisfaction, and demographic variables. After controlling for the effects of demographic variables and company tenure, ethical leadership was found to have a negative impact on emotional exhaustion ( = -0.128, p < 0.01), and to be positively related to organizational embeddedness ( = 0.518, p < 0.01). After adding in the mediating variable (organizational embeddedness), the effect of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion was no longer significant ( = 0.012, ns), while organizational embeddedness emerged as significantly related to emotional exhaustion ( = -0.269, p < 0.01), implying that the effect of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion was completely mediated by organizational embeddedness. Simultaneously, the results suggested that job satisfaction could strengthen the mediating effect of organizational embeddedness on emotional exhaustion (the difference in the mediating effect between the groups with respective high and low job satisfaction was -0.096, p < 0.05). This study proposed and validated a moderated mediation model, the implications of which are that ethical leadership is an effective way to alleviate frontline service employees' emotional exhaustion.

Perceived contract violation and job satisfaction

Purpose

This paper aims to investigate how employees’ perceptions of psychological contract violation or sense of organizational betrayal, might diminish their job satisfaction, as well as how their access to two critical personal resources – emotion regulation skills and work-related self-efficacy – might buffer this negative relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

Two-wave survey data came from employees of Pakistani-based organizations.

Findings

Perceived contract violation reduces job satisfaction, but the effect is weaker at higher levels of emotion regulation skills and work-related self-efficacy.

Practical implications

For organizations, these results show that the frustrations that come with a sense of organizational betrayal can be contained more easily to the extent that their employees can draw from relevant personal resources.

Originality/value

This investigation provides a more complete understanding of when perceived contract violation will deplete employees’ emotional resources, in the form of feelings of happiness about their job situation. A sense of organizational betrayal is less likely to escalate into reduced job satisfaction when employees can control their negative emotions and feel confident about their work-related competencies.

Dissatisfied employees, diminished helping: Using psychological capital to buffer the damaging effects of job dissatisfaction on helping behaviours

Drawing from conservation of resources theory, this study considers how employees' job dissatisfaction might reduce their engagement in helping behaviour, whereas their psychological capital might enhance this behaviour. The negative relationship between job dissatisfaction and helping behaviour in turn might be buffered by psychological capital. Data from Pakistani organizations provide empirical support for these theoretical predictions. The findings indicate that organizations with employees who feel unhappy about their job situation can still enjoy productive helping behaviours, to the extent they develop adequate personal resources within their ranks.

The Relationship between Workplace Incivility and Helping Behavior: Roles of Job Dissatisfaction and Political Skill

This article investigates the mediating role of job dissatisfaction in the relationship between employees' perceptions of workplace incivility and their helping behavior, as well as the buffering role of political skill in this process. Three-wave, time-lagged data collected from employees and their supervisors revealed that employees' exposure to workplace incivility diminished their helping behavior through their sense of job dissatisfaction. This mediating role of job dissatisfaction was less salient, however, to the extent that employees were equipped with political skill. For organizations, this study accordingly pinpoints a key mechanism-namely, unhappiness about their job situation-through which rude coworker treatment links to lower voluntary workplace behaviors among employees, and it reveals how this mechanism can be better contained in the presence of political skill.