Mediating Effect of Authenticity and Emotional Dissonance between Emotional Work Strategies and Burnout

Abstract

Purpose- In the service industry, soft skills are considered as a key skill which involves continuous interpersonal interactions. These interpersonal interactions induce the employees to modify their real emotions with the adoption of surface acting and deep acting strategy which further leads to burnout. The present study is aimed to identify the relationship between acting strategies and burnout. Further, the study has also investigated the mediating role of emotional dissonance and authenticity at workplace between surface acting and burnout and deep acting and burnout respectively. Design/Methodology/Approach - The study has been conducted on employees of Civil Aviation Industry of North India working on different frontline profiles. Data has been collected from 600 employees through a pretested questionnaire. For testing the hypothesis, Hayes Process mediation model has been applied. Findings- Findings have revealed that emotional work in both forms of strategies are significantly and positively related to burnout however deep acting is relatively weakly associated with burnout. Further, emotional dissonance has been identified as a significant mediator between surface acting and burnout with full mediation effect. Similarly, authenticity at workplace has been identified as a significant mediator with a partial mediation effect between deep acting and burnout. Practical/Research Implications- The study has implicated for organisations which are engaged in emotional work to encourage deep acting emotional work through various interventions in the form of training programmes. Originality/Value- The study has empirically explored the reason behind the relative differences of effect of surface acting strategy and deep acting strategy on burnout which has not been done earlier in Indian emotional work settings.