Relationship between Emotional Labor and Job Satisfaction: Testing Mediating Role of Emotional Intelligence on South Kor
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Relationship between Emotional Labor and Job Satisfaction: Testing Mediating Role of Emotional Intelligence on South Korean Public Service Employees Hyun Jung Lee 1 Accepted: 6 October 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Nearly half of public sector jobs involve emotional labor and the studies on emotional labor in the public service have been growing nowadays. However, prior studies on the consequences of the dimensions of emotional labor (surface acting and deep acting) have revealed the mixed findings, especially relations with job satisfaction in the public service. To clarify inconsistent results of the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction, this study incorporates emotional intelligence as the mediator in a sample of public service employees in South Korea. Theoretically, those who perform emotional labor are more highly satisfied with their jobs when they possess higher levels of emotional intelligence skills. The findings revealed that only deep acting and job satisfaction was significantly and positively related and only emotional-self regulation was partially mediated among the dimensions of emotional intelligence between deep acting and job satisfaction. While this study focuses on the South Korean context, findings also raise awareness to Western culture context. Keywords Emotional labor . Emotional intelligence . Job satisfaction . Public service
employees Employees in the service industry perform emotional labor—that is, individual effort to express and/or suppress their own emotion to comply with organizationally desired emotion during a service transaction (Hochschild 1983). For most street-level employees in public service, there is no exception. In fact, due to the very nature of the job, public servants, i.e., nurses, police, fire fighters, and social workers, and those who address civil affairs at the ward office, perform emotional labor because they must * Hyun Jung Lee [email protected]
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Department of Public Administration, MyongJi University, 2912, Geobookgolro 34, Seodaemoongu, Seoul 120-728, South Korea
Lee H.J.
respond to the demands of citizens with a pleasant demeanor—an act that is the very definition of emotional labor (Lee 2018a). As public service work environments have adapted to the market-oriented structure, customer satisfaction in the public service has become an important factor for achieving higher performance (Song et al. 2017). Thus, in recent years, the traditional focus of public management has shifted from rational decision-making models to models that value employees’ emotions based on an acknowledgement that employees’ emotional experiences can affect work performance as well as service quality. This shift has been particularly apparent in administrative services in South Korea, where the employees have been instructed to maximize citizen satisfaction through a relationship focused attitude rather than to exhort an empowered position over their customers. For example, public service employees h
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