Chinese hotel employees in the smiling masks: roles of job satisfaction, burnout, and supervisory support in relationships between emotional labor and performance

Abstract

Using survey data obtained from 206 frontline hotel employees (Study 1) and 111 employee–supervisor dyads (Study 2), we examined how the emotional labor of hotel employees was associated with affective and behavioral outcomes. We found that surface acting was negatively related to job satisfaction but positively related to burnout. Meanwhile, deep acting was positively related to job satisfaction but negatively related to burnout. Additionally, job satisfaction and burnout were found to mediate the relationship between emotional labor and work performance. We further found that supervisory support moderated the relationships between emotional labor and job satisfaction and burnout.

Keywords:

• burnout
• cognitive dissonance
• emotional labor
• job satisfaction
• supervisory support

Acknowledgements

This paper was supported by grants from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR, China (GRF No. CityU141007), the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Project No. A-PK62), Ministry of Science and Technology of Weifang (No. 200702053), Weifang Association of Social Science (2010), the Programming Project of the Philosophy and Social Science of Zhejiang Province, China (No. 09CGGL00YB), and the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province, China (No. Y2100634).