Service employees’ naturally felt emotions: Do they matter?

Abstract

Frontline service employees often engage in emotional labour as part of their job requirements. Previous studies focus on surface acting and deep acting and their outcomes for employees and customers but largely ignore the expression of naturally felt emotions (NFE). This study focuses on NFE and investigates two potential employee outcomes—commitment to organizational display rules and burnout. Using two-wave data from U.S. service employees and employee burnout as a lagged dependent variable, the author investigates relationships between NFE and two employee outcomes. He also considers which of the three emotional labour dimensions best predicts these outcomes. Unlike surface and deep acting, NFE is negatively associated with display rule commitment and burnout; these associations are stable over time. The results also confirm the mediating role of display rule commitment. Theoretically, the present study shows that emotional labour–burnout relationships differ across the three emotional labour strategies of surface acting, deep acting and NFE, and thus complements previous emotion regulation research in a service organization context. Managerially, the findings improve understanding of the role of NFE, in terms of driving key employee outcomes. Knowledge of the mechanism by which NFE influences employee outcomes can help service and human resource managers design more effective display rules.