Influence of personality traits on emotional labor and job performance: A socioanalytic theory

Abstract

Importance of providing excellent quality of customer service has been paid a lot of attention and the organizations began to set a rule for employees to regulate their emotions (Hochschild, 1983). Especially, the organization’s profit is directly related with the quality of customer service, researchers and practitioners have tried to investigate factors that influence on employees’ performances. With a display rule (Ekman, 1973) set by the organizations, those customer service employees have to regulate their emotions in order to provide best services. This notion of putting effort to regulate one’s own emotions to make profitable outcomes has known as emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983; Grandey, 2000). With Hochschild’s definition of emotional labor, two ways of regulating emotions were presented: Surface acting (managing outward emotion expressions without regulating one’s genuine emotions) and deep acting (tying to correspond displaying expressions with one’s truly felt emotions) (Hochschild, 1983; Grnadey, 2000). In addition to the two acting strategies, Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) proposed the third way of expressing emotions, which was known as displaying of genuine expressions (displaying emotions without putting effort on regulating one’s genuine feelings). This study employed all three ways of displaying emotions along with personality traits and affective states in order to find their significant relationships with emotional labor employees’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intention, and job performance. Unlike to the existing studies on personality and emotional labor, this study focused on socioanalytic perspective, in which primarily specified social interactions within the groups and individuals. For the study, one hundred and seventy six emotional labor employees’ survey data were used to examine the proposed hypotheses. The statistical analyses and final results show significant predictive power of the personality trai...