Employee emotional displays in the extended service encounter

Revisiting the Effect of Emotional Labor: A Multi-Level Investigation in Front-Line Service Teams

The main purpose of this study is to consider individuals in teams and to reexamine how emotional labor affects the performance of front-line service team and team members through emotional exhaustion. Multi-source data collection and a time-lagged research design was adopted to collect data from matched team members and customers nested in 82 front-line service teams in a large electronics provider based in China. The findings show that surface acting increases emotional exhaustion which reduces customer loyalty at the team level and individual task performance at the individual level, supporting a full mediation model. While, deep acting is not associated with emotional exhaustion, it is positively linked with team member’s task performance. This study provides evidence for the nested nature of emotional labor and exhaustion in teams.

Employee norm-violations in the service encounter during the corona pandemic and their impact on customer satisfaction

In this study, an experiment was used to examine the effects of employee norm-violations in the service encounter with respect to what was considered appropriate behavior (e.g., social distancing) during the 2020 corona pandemic. The participants were exposed to a grocery store employee whose behavior was manipulated (norm-violating vs. norm-confirming). Norm-violating behavior resulted in lower perceived employee warmth, lower perceived employee competence, higher disgust, and more dehumanization of the employee. These responses mediated the impact of employee behavior on customer satisfaction, so that satisfaction was attenuated when norms were violated. The mediators, however, typically also instill a hostile, avoidance-seeking mindset for those who are subject to norm-violations, which is likely to result in problems when transgressors are to be persuaded to change their behaviors.