Effects of Emotional Labor Strategies on Job Stress and Creativity

Abstract

This paper examined the effects of emotional labor strategies (surface acting and deep acting) on different kinds of job stress (hindrance stress and challenge stress) and frontline employee creativity, as well as the mediating effects of job stress on the relationship between emotional labor strategies and creativity. The research hypotheses were tested using data collected from 416 service employee¨Csupervisor dyads in 82 Chinese local restaurants. Results shows that surface acting is positively related to hindrance stress while negatively related to frontline employee creativity; deep acting is positively related to both challenge stress and frontline employee creativity; hindrance stress mediated the relationship between surface acting and creativity. Our study advances knowledge about the relationship between emotional labor strategies and stress by classifying different job stress caused by different strategies. More importantly, it extends the consequences of emotional labor strategies to frontline employee creativity from a cognitive perspective, and revealing the role of hindrance stress as mediating mechanism through which surface acting affects creativity.