The consequences of internal marketing activities on emotional labor in tourism industry

Abstract

In today`s globalized business environments the road to survival and success is through customer satisfaction. Particularly for the service companies, employees are also required to show emotional labor in the service delivery in addition to their physical performance based on the fact that customer satisfaction is directly related to the emotions displayed by employees. Canalizing employees to perform emotional labor is an important issue. Here, the internal marketing practices emerge as a managerial tool. Accordingly employees perceptions towards internal marketing practices that are considered to have important consequences on companies, and the way internal marketing practices affect employees ‘emotional labor behavior are the matters of concern. The purpose of this study is to examine how internal marketing activities in tourism enterprises affect the behavior of emotional labor of the staff working in tourism enterprises. In this study, the effects of internal marketing activities on to the behavior of emotional labor of employees were examined. The survey was conducted on 136 employees working in hotel businesses operating in the Kocaeli province tourism sector and the hypotheses developed to investigate whether the internal marketing policies applied by hotel operators affect the behavior of emotional labor and the hypotheses developed for this purpose were tested with structural equation model as the SmartPLS 2.0. The literature of the study as conceptually has been extensively reviewed and after the analysis the findings of the research have been interpreted according to the literature. Findings show that internal marketing practices are positively and significantly related to surface acting and deep acting. Moreover, findings do not provide any empirical evidence to support the direct relationship between internal marketing practices and emotional mismatch. In addition to that, in the study some issues such as the importance of emotional labor for tourism enterprises and the relationship between the practices of internal marketing and emotional labor are discussed and suggested