Abstract
Research has shown that while the authenticity of positive emotional displays plays an important role in service encounters, it has not yet demonstrated a universally positive effect on customers’ behavior. This study, which is the first to present customer involvement as a contextual factor that influences customers’ processing, provides a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of the authenticity of emotional displays. The model is based on expectation disconfirmation theory and emotional contagion theory and is validated in a field experiment and two laboratory experiments that use video stimuli with actors in real-world contexts. The results show that even inauthentic displays can meet customers’ expectations depending on their involvement and that high-involvement customers adapt to employees’ authentic emotions more strongly than low-involvement customers do. In summary, the presented model strengthens the understanding of the role of authentic displays and provides an approach to improve the effectiveness of emotional labor strategies.
Highlights
Interactions between customers and employees are vital for business success in a variety of industries
While customer involvement was determined before the service encounter in Study 2, in Study 3, we investigated whether the change in involvement during the interaction had an effect on customer processing
Our research provides a deeper understanding of the effects of emotional labor strategies on customer loyalty intention
Summary
Interactions between customers and employees are vital for business success in a variety of industries. This is true for retailers, such as hardware stores (Albrecht et al 2016) and pharmacies (Olk et al 2021), or for the service sector, such as hotels (Lechner and Mathmann 2020) and restaurants (Chi et al 2011). Hochschild (2003) describes emotional labor as control over emotions to generate a desired facial and bodily display. Two techniques are available for generating desired emotional displays. Deep acting enables an individual to experience a desired emotion by placing himself or herself in a situation that elicits the actual emotion (i.e., authentic displays). Surface acting is a technique in which the desired emotion is displayed but not experienced (i.e., inauthentic displays) (Grandey 2000)
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