Investment in Emotional Labor: Daily Resource Spirals and Recovery

Abstract

Service workers perform emotional labor with customers by surface acting (modifying expressions) or deep acting (modifying mood). Surface acting clearly has more costs and fewer gains than deep acting, but it is less clear how those daily costs and gains contribute to the performance of emotional labor over time. Based on emotional labor theorizing and conservation of resources (COR) theory, daily investment of resources (i.e., emotional and cognitive) are needed for surface and deep acting, which result in that day’s net resource loss or gain, respectively. We argue that over time, this creates accumulating resource losses or gain (i.e., spirals) that predict future strategy use, unless one recovers those resources after work. We conduct a novel and rigorous test of this idea, using two experience sampling methodology (ESM) studies of service workers, and applying latent difference score models to capture resource accumulation over time. Across both studies, results supported resource gain and loss spirals: Deep acting required an investment of emotional resources that created increasingly greater resource gains, while surface acting had accumulating losses to emotional resources each day, making it harder and harder to invest in deep acting in future days. Importantly, recovery after work, specifically low-effort activities, mitigated resource loss spirals from surface acting and enhanced resource gain spirals via deep acting. Results offer new evidence for untested theoretical assumptions about emotional labor and COR, while providing recommendations for how to replenish and protect service workers’ emotional resources over time.