AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTIONAL LABOR, SALES CALL ANXIETY AND WORK PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Emotional labor research has focused on employees' interactions with customers that is a significant part of organizational life. It is a fact that during this interactions emotions are regulated and managed by employees. Regulation of emotions produces positive outputs such as performance improvement in terms of businesses, but also negative psychological consequences such as anxiety in terms of employees. In this context the purpose of this empirical study is to investigate the effects of emotional labor strategies, superficial and deep acting, on sales call anxiety (SCA) and performance. The data was collected from 277 salespeople who worked in banks and automotive dealerships by using survey method. The research hypotheses were tested with structural equation model. The findings confirm that all scales, particularly SCA, are reliable and validate in Turkey. However, the results show that the effect of emotional labor strategies on SCA are different. While surface acting strategy has a positive effect on SCA, deep acting has a negative effect. Although the relationship between emotional labor strategies and performance was not supported, it was found that SCA has a negative impact on the performance of salespeople. These findings have been based on the literature and suggestions are provided for future research and administrative applications.