The Role of Occupational Stress in the Association between Emotional Labor and Mental Health: A Moderated Mediation Model

Heyeon Park,Sunjoo Boo,Hyunjin Oh

doi:10.3390/su11071886

Abstract

This study investigated whether occupational stress factors moderate the effect of emotional labor on psychological distress in call center employees. A cross-sectional and descriptive study using anonymous paper-based survey methods was conducted in a sample of 283 call center employees in South Korea. Participants completed the Emotional Labor Scale, the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale, and the Korean Occupational Stress Scale. Moderated mediation analyses were conducted using the PROCESS macro in order to investigate the relationship among variables. The results showed that the association between surface acting while having emotional labor and psychological distress was mediated by emotional dissonance. The mediated effect of emotional dissonance was moderated by discomfort in occupational climate, suggesting that improving the occupational environment can lessen the level of psychological distress among emotional workers, and that more attention should be devoted to the development of an intervention at the organizational level in order to prevent mental health problems in this population.

Highlights

With the growth of the service industry, emotional labor and its consequences among front-line service employees have been receiving a lot of attention in the field of public mental health
When there was a discrepancy between felt emotions and displayed emotions, employees suffered from emotional dissonance, which is an important component of emotional labor [11]
By using moderated mediation models, we found that the level of emotional labor has a positive association with the severity of psychological distress and that its effect on psychological distress varies according to the level of discomfort in the occupational climate

Summary

Introduction

With the growth of the service industry, emotional labor and its consequences among front-line service employees have been receiving a lot of attention in the field of public mental health. Emotional labor seems to play a critical role in the development of mental health problems. Previous studies have reported the association of emotional labor with depression, suicidal thoughts, anxiety disorder, and somatization [4,5,6,7,8,9]. There are two strategies of emotional labor: surface acting and deep acting. Deep acting indicates that employees try to create feeling that must be expressed, while surface acting refers to their merely putting on a mask [11,12]. The previous findings showed that emotional dissonance is associated with burnout and mediates between the association between emotional labor and employees’ well-being [13,14]. It is possible that emotional dissonance mediates the association of emotional labor with psychological distress

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Conclusion