Abstract
The behavior displayed by service employees affects customers’ perception of service quality and their level of satisfaction. Therefore, understanding emotional labor strategies has become a key competitive advantage for service organizations. The purpose of this study is to provide an in-depth review studies that discussed and examined emotional labor strategies from customer point of view. This study used a systematic literature review approach on emotional labor studies. The results showed that customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and word of mouth are considered the most important outcomes of emotional labor strategies. Further, the results showed that the majority of previous studies used dyadic questionnaire as a data collection method. More importantly, drawn from the review results, a research framework was developed to show the customer outcomes of emotional labor strategies and the mediators/moderators between emotional labor strategies and customer outcomes. This article is one of the earliest studies that provides a systematic review of previous studies on emotional labor from customer point of view and uncovers the definitions, models, and methods and factors in order to clarify the emotional labor concept. Keywords: Emotional labor, Surface acting, Deep acting, Customer satisfaction, Customer loyalty, Word of mouth, Systematic literature review, Research framework DOI : 10.7176/JMCR/57-03 Publication date :June 30 th 2019
Highlights
The concept of emotional labor (EL) was introduced by Hochschild (1979) and since researchers noticed the importance of this concept in service sector and how the emotional labor strategies could enhance the relationship between employees and customers (Lam & Chen, 2012; Jung & Yoon, 2014; Wong & Wang, 2009; Zapf, 2002)
This study aims to answer the following questions: 1- What are the conceptualizations of EL concept and strategies? 2- What are the outcomes of EL strategies factors in the previous research? 3- What are the mediators/mediators that have been used in previous research? 4- What are the data collection methods and the EL scales that prior studies used to examine the relationship between EL and customer outcomes?
The second section discusses the factors of EL including customer outcomes of EL and mediators/moderators that have been used in previous studies
Summary
The concept of emotional labor (EL) was introduced by Hochschild (1979) and since researchers noticed the importance of this concept in service sector and how the emotional labor strategies could enhance the relationship between employees and customers (Lam & Chen, 2012; Jung & Yoon, 2014; Wong & Wang, 2009; Zapf, 2002). Researchers started in paying more attention to emotional labor concept, which can be defined as a process of planning, controlling and displaying specific emotions that meet organizational goals (Karim & Weisz, 2011). Expressed emotions from service employees could affect customer’s impression, which in turn, affects the whole customer’s perceptions of service quality of the organization (Lam & Chen, 2012).frontline employees should display certain emotions during service encounters with customers to meet organizational rules and to achieve customer satisfaction (Groth et al, 2009). Service organizations should concentrate more on emotions in work environment and they should enhance functional emotional laboring to create a better service environment, which will lead to increase service quality and customer satisfaction (Hwa & Amin, 2016)
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