Emotional labor and work performance: The roles of job satisfaction, burnout, and supervisory emotional support

While the current decade have seen employees’ effort and management of expressing organizationally desired emotions at work is the key for the success of service industry, little attention has been paid to identify how employees actually think and react when they display such emotions. It is thus worthy to seek for how emotion regulation strategies (surface acting, which involves suppressing one’s felt emotions and faking the desired emotions, and deep acting, which involves actually experiencing the desired emotions) affects one’s feelings of job-fit, level of emotion exhaustion, burnout, and work performance. Additionally, it is more interesting to investigate whether or not and how supervisors’ emotional support strengthens the influences of emotion regulation strategies upon employees’ affective and behavioral outcomes. In this research, we use the theory of cognitive dissonance to hypothesize and explain how displays of emotional regulation strategies affect one’s psychological states in the form of job satisfaction and burnout, and hence one’s work performance. The findings here will not only shed light on the psychological process of emotional labor, but also have implications for the effective control of emotional labor in the workplace.