Workplace spirituality as a means of enhancing service employee well-being through emotional labor strategy choice
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Workplace spirituality as a means of enhancing service employee well-being through emotional labor strategy choice Wen Chi Zou 1 & Jeffery D. Houghton 2 & Jun Justin Li 3 Accepted: 11 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study examines whether workplace spirituality can influence the emotional labor strategy choices and the subjective wellbeing of service employees. We integrate conservation of resources theory and social role theory to examine the joint effects of workplace spirituality and gender differences on deep acting and surface acting. Our findings suggest that deep acting and surface acting differentially mediate the relationship between workplace spirituality and subjective well-being. Through a moderated mediation analysis, we demonstrate a stronger connection for females between subjective well-being and workplace spirituality through deep acting than for males. The results of this study shed light on how and why workplace spirituality and individual differences influence the emotional labor and subjective well-being of service employees. These results also expand our knowledge of how to help service employees gain and invest resources during their work processes and also provide a new practical way the service organization can decrease the potential negative effects of emotional labor on service employees. Keywords Workplace spirituality . Emotional labor . Deep acting . Surface acting . Subjective well-being . Gender
Introduction In the face of ever-increasing global competition, the service industry has come to appreciate the importance of competing based on service excellence rather than simply on price. The competitiveness of service organizations is uniquely dependent upon the quality of interactions between service employees and customers. In the context of such interactions, many organizations expect service employees to manage their emotions effectively in order to create a sustainable feeling of pleasant interaction for customers (Lee et al. 2014). Consequently, service employees must display the organization’s desired facial expressions and behavioral norms to customers to fulfill their job requirements. This kind of emotional labor can lead service employees to experience frequent emotional exhaustion, ultimately triggering psychological strain, * Jun Justin Li [email protected] 1
School of Business, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China
2
John Chambers College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA
3
School of Tourism Management, South China Normal University, Higher Education Mega Center, Guangzhou, China
job dissatisfaction and high turnover rates (Byrne et al. 2011; Lee et al. 2014; Hülsheger and Schewe 2011). Given this situation, gaining a better understanding of the potential factors that could provide new resources for and increase the well-being of service employees is both a critical and timely issue. Emotional labor by service employees involves the delib
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