Edited by: Weon Sang Yoo, Korea University, South Korea
Reviewed by: Jin Ho Jung, Ohio Northern University, United States; Jungkeun Kim, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
This article was submitted to Organizational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
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Despite the growing body of research on emotional labor, little has been known about the social consequences of emotional labor. Drawing on emotional dissonance theory, the authors investigate the relationship between the felt emotional dissonance and prosocial behavior (e.g., donation to a charity). Findings from multiple studies suggest that higher emotional dissonance serially influences perceived lack of control, emotional exhaustion, lowered sympathy for others’ feeling, and subsequently lower willingness to help others. When individuals are asked to recall their past experiences of emotional dissonance, they expressed lack of control and emotional exhaustion (Study 3), lower sympathy for others’ feeling (Studies 1, 3), and subsequently become less willing to help others both in their intention (Studies 2A and 3) and with actual money (Study 2B). Further, this negative relationship is moderated by the display rules (i.e., surface acting vs. deep acting, Study 3). Managerial and public policy implications are discussed.
According to the
One characteristic peculiar to service-sector employees is their frequent contacts with customers. Therefore, previous research has emphasized the importance of managing these employees because evaluation of a service firm often depends on how customers perceive the interaction they have with the frontline employees (
Despite its positive impact on customers’ perceptions of service quality, the enforced emotional display rules are known to have negative impacts on both individual and organizational well-being (
Common in the aforementioned works is that most research has focused only on the outcome variables related to organizations’ performance. That is, the majority of works has been done from the perspectives of organizations. In spite of its practical and theoretical significance of this topic, there is a dearth of research on this topic from consumers’ perspectives. To our best knowledge, no research efforts have been devoted to examine the behaviors of emotional laborers as
The purpose of this research is to understand the psychology of emotional labor and its consequences beyond the organizational boundary. Specifically, we examine how emotional laborers would differ in their degree to feel sympathy toward others (or others’ feeling) and how this difference results in their pro-social intention and actual pro-social behavior. By examining these, we would like to shed light on the societal consequences of emotional labor, which has been neglected in the previous literature.
Since
Although the exact wording varies by scholars, what is common among various definitions is the notion of
One important (and implicit) assumption implied by the term ‘emotion regulation’ is that some emotions have to be regulated because, without being regulated, they might not be appropriate from the perspectives of organizations. For instance, if there is a conflict between the emotions an employee wants to express and the emotions an organization wants their employees to express, the employee must regulate emotions.
According to
By contrast, in the second emotion regulation technique, employees just manipulate emotional expressions of their responses to the situation without adjusting the perception of the situation. By either faking the expressions entirely or adjusting the intensity of the displayed emotions, employees try to
When an employee is engaged in this second type of emotion regulation technique (i.e., surface acting), the employee recognizes that the emotion he/she expressed differs from the emotion he/she actually felt, and consequently feels emotional discrepancy. This perceived discrepancy is called ‘emotional dissonance’ (
Emotional dissonance, in many aspects, is analogous to cognitive dissonance (
Organizational behavior literature on the perceived control has equivocally reported positive relationship between high levels of perceived control and job-related variables (e.g.,
More relevant to our theorizing are the findings by
Although the role of perceived control has not been explicitly highlighted in the previous literature, the relationship between emotional dissonance and resource depletion is not a new notion. Rather, emotional dissonance has been regarded as a major source of ego-depletion (
Many emotional labor researchers have also examined the relationship between emotional dissonance and a construct very similar to resource depletion under different names such as emotional exhaustion, burnout, fatigue, and energy depletion (e.g.,
One subtle difference between self-regulation and emotional regulation theory lies in at which level it defines resource depletion (or emotional exhaustion). The latter theory defines emotional exhaustion as the physiological responses while the former theory includes not only physiological but also psychological states. In this research, we take the perspectives of the former.
Then, what would be the consequences of emotional exhaustion? We argue that when people are emotionally exhausted, they have no emotional resources they can use in the interaction with others. As a result, they would be less likely to feel sympathy for others’ feeling. Taken together, we propose that if an individual experiences emotional dissonance, they would feel less sympathy toward others. It is formally stated as,
What, then would be the consequences of this lowered sympathy? A body of literature on prosocial behavior shows the strong linkage between individual’s sympathy (or empathy) and prosocial behavior (
If our proposed effects are driven by emotional dissonance, emotional laborers engaged in deep acting (vs. surface acting) would not exhibit the same pattern of behavior (i.e., lowered sympathy and lowered willingness to act pro-socially). For deep acting, by definition, is a strategy to adapt one’s inner thoughts and feeling (
In a series of multiple studies, we tested our hypotheses. We first report the results of a study that examines the relationship between emotional dissonance and the degree to which one feels sympathy for the needy (Study 1). Then, we report two studies that establish the basic effect. We either manipulated (Study 2A) or measured (Study 2B) individual’s emotional dissonance and found that, the greater dissonance one feels, the less one is willing to help others (Study 2A) or the less money one actually donates to a charity (Study 2B). Finally, we tested if different emotion regulation strategies (i.e., deep acting vs. surface acting) would have differential impacts on prosocial intention (Study 3). Additionally, more refined process measures (e.g., sense of control and emotional exhaustion) are tested with serial mediation tests (Study 3).
The purpose of Study 1 is to examine the relationship between emotional dissonance and sympathy for others’ feeling. As we stated in our theorizing, previous research predicts that those experiencing emotional dissonance would become less sympathetic for others’ feelings. We test this hypothesis in this study.
A total of 201 participants (
After completing the writing task, all participants were informed that the first study was done. Then, they completed a filler task described as an unrelated second study. Following the filler task, participants answered to a battery of demographic questions into which we ostensibly inserted the six-item ‘Sympathy for the Feelings of Others’ scale (
Independent
The objectives of Study 2A are twofold. First, we examine if there exists a hypothesized relationship between emotional dissonance and prosocial behavior. We predict that if participants feel emotional dissonance, they would be less likely to act pro-socially. Second, we provide process evidence. We propose that lowered sympathy for others’ feeling would mediate the effect of emotional dissonance on prosocial behavior.
Two hundred and five participants were recruited from Amazon’s mTurk (
Prior to the study, all the participants were informed that they would be participating in several short studies. The first study was introduced as a writing task. We used the same writing task as in Study 1 to manipulate emotional dissonance. We did not, however, hide the next button nor did measure the time spent on the writing task.
Following the writing task, participants proceeded to the next stage framed as an unrelated second study. In this stage, participants were asked to view two fictitious posters of a non-profit organization. Each poster highlights different causes. One poster depicts a group of children in the classroom, soliciting for help on educating children in underdeveloped countries. The other poster portrays people looking over the area seriously damaged by the earthquake, appealing for help on recovering from a disaster. To make them look real, we put the UNICEF logo in the corner of both posters (see Appendix
Participants were presented with one poster at a time. Along with the poster, we measured an individual’s willingness to act pro-socially using the following two questions; ‘how much would you be willing to
Finally, we collected the same six-item sympathy for others’ feeling scale (
Participants in the emotional dissonance condition reported lower sympathy for others’ feeling (
Sympathy for others’ feeling.
Emotional dissonance | Control | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
Children’s education | 3.48 (2.07) | 3.97 (1.98) | ||
Recovery from Natural Disaster | 3.59 (2.10) | 4.11 (1.98) |
Finally, a mediation analysis (PROCESS model 4 with 5,000 bootstrapped samples,
Mediational analysis for Study 2A. ∗
The results of Study 2A provide initial evidence for the notion that people experiencing emotional dissonance are less willing to help others. Specifically, we used two different causes (i.e., providing children with better education and recovery from a natural disaster) and two different ways to help (i.e., donation and sharing on social media) to examine the willingness to help others, and the results did not vary by the causes nor by the types of acts, which together increases the generalizability of our findings. Moreover, in Study 2A, we examined the underlying mechanism and found that this emotional dissonance effect is mediated by the lowered sympathy.
It should be, however, noted that the effect sizes reported here are rather weak. We conjecture that this might be due to the fact that we did not impose any restrictions on the qualifications of potential participants. That is, we allowed anyone to participate in our study. Therefore, if a non-service worker was asked to recall their experiences of emotional dissonance, he/she might not be able to vividly recall them, which subsequently may affect our manipulation of emotional dissonance. The data on employment status shows that among 205 participants, only 79% (162/205) were the paid employees (not all of them were service workers), while 14.1% (29/205) and 6.9% (14/205) of the participants were self-employed and not working, respectively. Although we have no data on specific industries in which the participants are working, we posit that the proportion of service workers was lower than 79%, which might contribute to our weak effect sizes. Therefore, hereafter throughout the remaining studies, we collected the data only from the service-workers.
Although the results suggest that emotional laborers (vs. non-emotional laborers) would be less likely to help others, our results in Study 2A are solely based on a self-reported willingness rather than actual behavior. Of course, it is not always required to examine actual behavior in order to generalize the findings on willingness to real behavior because there is a widely accepted notion that attitudes and intention are the precursors of behavior (e.g.,
The purpose of Study 2B is to examine actual prosocial behavior of emotional laborers. For this, we developed a simple experimental paradigm where participants are unexpectedly provided with an opportunity to earn a small amount of money and then determine what percentage of that money they would like to donate to a charity. We employed actual donation behavior because it would be a strong test; the money is real, and the participants have economic incentives not to donate. Therefore, using this experimental paradigm, if we find a difference in the amount of donation by the degree to which one feels emotional dissonance, it would lend more support to our proposition that emotional dissonance negatively affects prosocial behavior.
To test if our proposed emotional dissonance effect holds in a situation where the real money is involved, we piggybacked our study on another unrelated survey. We covertly asked three sets of questions at three locations of the unrelated survey; the eligibility questions at the beginning, emotional dissonance questions in the middle, and an extra money offer question at the end. We described these questions more in detail below.
First, the eligibility questions consist of two items about employment status and the specific job functions. If respondents are paid-employees and work in the service-related industry, they are the potential subjects qualified for our study. Second, emotional dissonance is measured with the two-item emotional dissonance questions (
Once participants have agreed to continue, they were instructed that the purpose of the short survey is to examine how much people would like to donate to a certain non-profit organization. Specifically, they read that they can pledge to donate any percentages of their $1 bonus payment that will be actually matched by us, and their bonus payment will be determined by deducting their pledged amount from the original $1. For instance, if a participant decides to donate 40% of the bonus money (i.e., $.4), a total of $.8 (after we match the amount) will be donated to the charity, and the participant will be receiving $.6 (i.e., $1–$.4). It was emphasized that they can freely choose any percentages between 0 and 100%. Moreover, they read, not to be compelled to look nice, and it would be completely their choice. On the following page, participants viewed a modified version of the UNICEF poster used in Study 2A that solicits donations for children in the underdeveloped country. Participants then indicated what percentages they would like to donate to the charity and what percentages they would like to keep to themselves, respectively, which should sum to 100%.
Participants were recruited through Amazon’s mTurk. Among 1133 mTurkers who accepted the HIT, 301 respondents claimed themselves as the paid-workers in the service industry, thus passed our predetermined criteria. Only these respondents answered to the two-item emotional dissonance questions in the middle of the unrelated survey. Subsequently, it was only to these respondents that the extra money offer question was shown at the end of the unrelated survey. Two hundred forty-four respondents agreed to participate in this extra short survey. Therefore, all of the analyses in Study 2B hereafter are based on these 244 participants (
We averaged the two emotional dissonance scales (
Although we clearly understand the problems of dichotomizing a continuous independent variable (
In Study 2B, we replicated the findings of Study 2A that emotional dissonance decreases prosocial behavior. The study design of Study 2B, however, is quite different from Study 2A in several aspects. First, the sample was carefully selected. In contrast to Study 2A where the sample was drawn from the general population, in Study 2B, we drew our sample from the specific group of people that fits our purpose better; paid-employees working in the service-related industry.
Second, different from the previous two studies where we
Finally, we used the real money in Study 2B to test our hypothesis. By demonstrating that the results still hold when participants were asked to donate their real money, we showed that our hypothesized effect is very robust. One thing to note here is, the final set of subjects in our Study 2B (
So far, in three studies, we have demonstrated that those experiencing emotional dissonance are less willing to help the needy, and this effect is mediated by lowered sympathy for others’ feeling. Then, can we conclude that emotional laborers help the needy less? What would happen if an emotional laborer does not experience emotional dissonance much? Does he/she still help others less or more? Our theory suggests that only those experiencing emotional dissonance would be less likely to help others. Therefore, if one is engaged in an emotion regulation strategy that does not lead to emotional dissonance (i.e., deep acting), he/she would not exhibit lowered sympathy nor lowered willingness to help others. We test this idea in the next study.
The objectives of Study 3 are twofold. First, as we discussed above, we examine if different emotion regulation strategies would have differential effects on prosocial behavior. We expect that the negative effect of emotion regulation on prosocial behavior would be attenuated in those engaged in deep acting. Second, we test additional mediators between emotion regulation and sympathy for others’ feeling. Following our theorizing, we examine if different emotion regulation strategies affect one’s sense of control and emotional exhaustion differently. By explicitly measuring and testing this theoretically proposed mechanism, we would like to provide with clearer picture of how emotional labor shapes an emotional laborers’ prosocial behavior.
We recruited our participants through Amazon’s mTurk. As in Study 2B, we asked two-item eligibility questions at the beginning of the survey, and only those who passed our predetermined qualification (paid-employees working in the service-related industry) participated. We targeted to collect 300 subjects. A total of 2021 mTurkers answered to the eligibility questions until 301 subjects completed our survey (
Although emotional dissonance is a concept very closely related to surface acting, and thus they are often interchangeably used in the emotional labor literature, emotional dissonance is distinct from surface acting in the sense that the former arises as resulting experiences from performing the latter (
Another purpose of Study 3 is to measure additional mediators. According to our theorizing, whether people are engaged in surface or deep acting, their sense of control will be influenced. This perceived control then influences emotional exhaustion, sympathy for others’ feeling, and subsequently pro-social intention. Therefore, the potential mediators we could measure include ‘sense of control,’ ‘emotional exhaustion,’ and ‘sympathy for others’ feeling.’
Participants’ perceived ‘sense of control’ was measured with
We measured our dependent variables using two scales; prosocial behavior (
All of our independent variables, mediators, and dependent variables were measured in the reverse order to avoid demand artifact. That is, participants answered to the questions about prosocial and charitable behavior first, then about sympathy for others’ feeling, emotional exhaustion, sense of control, and finally about surface and deep acting followed by demographic questions.
To test our hypothesis, we first ran two simple regressions. When we regressed prosocial behavior on surface acting, surface acting was found to be negatively associated with prosocial behavior [
We ran the same two regressions with charitable behavior as the dependent variable. When we first regressed charitable behavior on surface acting, different from our prediction and findings of Studies 2A and 2B, no significant associations were found [
To test if the theorized variables serially mediate the effect of emotion regulation strategies on prosocial behavior, we fit the data with model 6 in SPSS PROCESS macro with 5,000 bootstrapped samples (
The signs of beta coefficients were also all consistent with our theory. Specifically, ‘surface acting’ was negatively associated with ‘sense of control’ [
In addition to this big mediational model, two other mediational paths were also significant. Specifically, the indirect effect of surface acting on prosocial behavior via ‘sense of control’ (The Bootstrapped Indirect Effect = −0.0367, 95% CI = −0.0741, −0.0067), and via ‘emotional exhaustion’ and ‘sympathy for others’ feeling’ (The Bootstrapped Indirect Effect = −0.0387, 95% CI = −0.0732, −0.0102) were significant (see
Serial mediational analyses for Study 3.
When we ran a serial mediational analysis with the same dependent variable and mediators but with deep acting as the independent variable, the indirect effect of ‘deep acting’ on ‘prosocial behavior’ via three mediators was again significant (The Bootstrapped Indirect Effect = 0.0056, 95% CI = 0.0009,0.0127). The direct effect of deep acting on prosocial behavior remains significant [
The signs of beta coefficients were also all consistent with our theory. Specifically, ‘deep acting’ was positively associated with ‘sense of control’ [
In addition to this big mediational model, one additional mediational path was significant. Specifically, the indirect effect of deep acting on prosocial behavior via ‘sense of control’ (The Bootstrapped Indirect Effect = −0.0279, 95% CI = 0.0035,0.0630) was significant (see
When we ran the same mediational analyses with charitable behavior as the dependent variable, we found very similar results (see
The results of Study 3 are consistent with our theorizing as well as the prediction of H4. The effect of different emotion regulation strategies on prosocial behavior is serially mediated by perceived control, emotional exhaustion, and sympathy for others’ feeling. When an individual uses surface acting strategy, the pattern is the same as when one feels emotional dissonance; lowered sympathy and lowered prosocial intention. However, when an individual uses deep acting, the pattern is different from when one feels emotional dissonance; enhanced sympathy and higher prosocial intention. This opposite pattern results from the fact that deep acting does not trigger emotional dissonance, which lends more support for our proposed hypothesis that emotional dissonance is the driver of the effects.
In Study 3, two things are noteworthy. First, when we measured the mediators not explicitly hypothesized but believed to mediate the effect of emotional regulation strategies on prosocial behavior, an interesting pattern emerged; the indirect path from surface or deep acting to prosocial behavior via ‘sense of control’ was significant. It is a very interesting result that could lead to a totally different interpretation and model configuration. When people feel high (vs. low) perceived control due to deep (vs. surface) acting, they would be more (vs. less) likely to help others because they feel powerful (e.g.,
Alternative model configurations for Study 3.
Second, when we tested the effect of surface acting on charitable behavior, we found no associations between two variables. This result is not consistent with our findings that surface acting negatively influences prosocial behavior. We have gone extra miles to come up with plausible explanations, but our best conjecture is that participants might be influenced by the instructions. That is, when we asked the questions regarding charitable behavior, we asked our participants to think about a non-profit organization, and answer if they would do various charitable behavior. Therefore, people may think about their favorite organization, and probably answer more positively. But there exists no ancillary data to test this conjecture, thus we leave this issue as it is.
Findings of four studies provide consistent support for the emotional dissonance effect. That is, individuals experiencing emotional dissonance tend to be less sympathetic for others’ feeling, and subsequently less willing and likely to help others. This interesting phenomenon appears to hold true across various operationalizations. For instance, the pattern of results remains the same when emotional dissonance was manipulated (Studies 1 and 2A) or measured (Studies 2B and 3), and when the decision was hypothetical (Studies 2A and 3) or real (Study 2B), and when participants were considering children’s education or recovery from a disaster (Studies 2A and 2B). Moreover, this effect is found to be dependent on one’s emotion regulation strategies (Study 3). When people are engaged in deep (vs. surface) acting, the observed emotional dissonance effect disappeared. Taken together, the proposed emotional dissonance effect seems very robust.
Although we repeatedly replicated our key findings over multiple studies, statistical significance of support for our claim varied across studies. Especially, the results of Study 2A were significant only with a one-tailed test. We therefore conducted meta-analysis to examine (1) if the effect is on average statistically significant and (2) whether the effect sizes across studies are homogeneous. Following the recommendations by
Meta-analysis of Key Effect of Emotional Dissonance in Studies 1–3.
Effect of emotional dissonance on DVs of interest | Weighted mean effect size (based on Fisher’s Zr) | SE of the mean effect size | 95% CI Upper bound | 95% CI Lower bound | Q | df | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sympathy for others’ feeling (Studies 1, 2A, and 3) | −0.231 | 0.053 | −4.318 | −0.126 | −0.336 | 1.324 | 2 | 0.516 (n.s.) |
Prosocial Behavior (Studies 2A, 2B, and 3) | −0.144 | 0.043 | −3.387 | −0.061 | −0.228 | 0.835 | 2 | 0.659 (n.s.) |
Despite the results of meta-analysis, some may argue that our effects are driven not by the felt emotional dissonance but by different income levels. That is, people are less likely to donate if their income level is low while they are more likely to donate if their income level is high. If the significant results we demonstrated so far were not just spurious correlations (
To our best knowledge, the present research is the first attempt to examine the effect of emotional labor from the perspectives of consumers. Our research suggests that there exist many unexplored variables beyond the boundary of organizations. For instance, prosocial behavior that we introduced in this research is the variable that has never been examined along with emotional labor. We, however, proposed and demonstrated the significant linkage between emotional labor and prosocial behavior.
Additionally, we proposed multiple theoretical mediators including ‘sense of control.’ By showing that perceived control mediates the effect of emotional dissonance on emotional exhaustion, we unveiled one important construct between emotional dissonance and emotional exhaustion.
Despite not without limitations, we not only measured but also manipulate the degree to which emotional dissonance is perceived.
Research on emotional laborer from the perspectives of consumers has just begun. That means there exist numerous research opportunities in this topic. Especially, it would be fruitful to examine some consumer behavior that can be benefited from perceived emotional dissonance. For instance, if emotional dissonance makes people less emotional, it might be beneficial to consumers in a certain environment where consumers may easily fall prey to strong emotions (e.g., impulsive buying, addiction). The burgeoning area of financial decision making is one of the future areas to which this emotional dissonance research can contribute.
Our research suggests that the negative consequences of emotional labor may extend beyond organizational outcomes like Job retention rate or job satisfaction. Although we examined prosocial behavior as our main dependent variable, it is possible that emotional laborers act in ways more detrimental to the society. For instance, if emotional labor makes people to be less sympathetic toward others, it implies that people become more selfish and opportunistic. When more people become selfish, it is obvious that their behavior would incur societal costs. Additionally, it would be more difficult for government or policy makers to encourage people to join the force to solve many problems that should be solved by the society together (e.g., global warming, find dust problems in Asia). Therefore, policy makers may want to establish regulations guiding the display rules imposed by organizations in the service-sector.
Although we are not sure how long the effect of experienced emotional dissonance would last, we found that even briefly reminding of past experiences of emotional labor made people become less sympathetic and less willing to help others. This implies that even after leaving the job, the negative impact of working as a emotional laborer might last for a long time. Therefore, both legislators and policy makers need to think about devising the remedy for this. Guaranteed opportunities for consultation might be one possible solution.
Our findings suggest that deep acting does not lead to lowered prosocial behavior. One quick solution, thus, might be to train employees how to change the way they perceive the situation. Additionally, we found that it is perceive sense of control resulting from emotional dissonance that leads to lowered sympathy and willingness to help others. Thus, if managers could somehow induce this sense of control by various ways, we can expect to reduce the negative consequences of emotional labor.
Companies can improve the situation as well. For instance, increasing number of call centers in South Korea are nowadays allowing customer service workers to end a phone call at their discretion when experiencing verbal abuse (
Our work reported here is, to our best knowledge, the first academic investigation to examine the effect of emotional labor on prosocial intention and actual behavior. We believe that this paper along with our findings shed light on the area that has been neglected; emotional laborers’ behaviors as consumers. As we stated in our introduction, this has significant impact on the society. Our finding suggests that organizations have to carefully design the display rules so that the negative impact of being involved in emotional labor can be minimized. Very often, the focus of organizations can be on just their customers, but their employees need to be considered together for better outcomes for the society.
This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of IRB committee at Oklahoma State University with online informed consent from all subjects. The protocol was approved by the IRB committee at Oklahoma State University.
Y-nP developed the basic ideas and concepts. All authors designed and ran the experiments together. All analyses were done by Y-nP under the supervision of JJ. Y-nP drafted the manuscript and HH and JJ revised together.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at:
It should be noted that this lowered sense of control would be observed only in the employees engaged in surface acting. If an employee is engaged in deep acting, he/she would not recognize any discrepancy between the felt and expressed emotions (i.e., no emotional dissonance). Therefore, they would perceive that they have control over the way they express their true feeling, which results in enhanced sense of control. In fact, previous research has suggested that deep acting promotes a sense of control (e.g.,
Later we analyzed the data including the other two subscales and found that those two subscales are also significant mediators in some model specifications, however, we did not include these measures and would not discuss any further.