When do service employees smile? Response‐dependent emotion regulation in emotional labor

Abstract

SummaryWe advance the theoretical and practical understanding of affect in service interactions by conceptualizing employees and customers as concurrent participants in the same interaction. We analyzed employees' emotional labor requirements, which comprise both the well‐recognized requirement to display positive affect (i.e., acting is response independent) and the less‐recognized requirement to attend to customers' affective displays (i.e., acting is response dependent). We found support for our hypotheses across two studies, which compare the affective displays of employees and customers within the same interactions. In Study 1, we examined field data comprising 1 320 392 customer and employee messages from 164 899 real‐life chat‐based service interactions and used automated sentiment analysis to identify displays of positive and negative affect. In Study 2, we used simulated service interactions to examine discrete emotions. Using different methodologies, both Studies 1 and 2 found that employees and customers differ in their response‐dependent affective behaviors. Study 2 also demonstrated that employee response‐dependent affective behavior improves customer outcomes. Our analyses enrich the understanding of emotional labor, contribute to the theory of affect in social interactions by considering concurrent yet differing affective behaviors of partners in the same interaction, and suggest new and exciting methods for Organizational Behavior research.