Emotional Labor, Employee's Affective States and Job Satisfaction: Role of Supervisory Support

Abstract

The present research was carried out to study the emotional labor strategies and its association with job satisfaction and employees’ affective states among customer services employees. The primary objective of the study was to find out the relationship between three strategies of emotional labor i.e., surface acting, deep acting, and genuine expression of emotions with job satisfaction and affective states of employees. It was also aimed at addressing the dimensionality of emotional labor construct through establishing its validity in local settings. It further investigated the mechanism by exploring role of affective states as a mediator between the relationship of emotional labor and job satisfaction as well as the moderating effects of supervisory support on these mediated relationships. The present research was completed in two independent studies i.e., study-I and study–II. The study-1 was related to the adaptation and validation of instruments. Forward translation method was used to translate the scales into Urdu language and committee approach was conducted to select the best translation. These scales were then administered to 145 customer services employees from banking sector with the aim of establishing their psychometric properties. Only those employees were selected who had at least 14 years of education and six month of job experience on current job. The results of the empirical evaluation establish the initial validity of these scales through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and with item-to-total correlations. Psychometric properties of these translated scales indicated that these scales are internally consistent and valid instruments to administer on a sample of Pakistani customer services employees. Study–II (Main study) was conducted on the sample of 493 bank employees with a minimum of 14 years of education and at least six month of job experience on the present job. Firstly, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to further assess the initial factor ix

structure of instruments being adapted in study-I. Multiple regression analysis, and conditional process analysis were used to test the study hypotheses. The results indicated that emotional labor strategies i.e, surface acting, deep acting, and genuine expression of emotions have significant association with job satisfaction and affective states. Results further highlighted that surface acting is negatively associated with job satisfaction and negative affective state whereas genuine expression of emotions is positively associated with job satisfaction and positive affective state. However, deep acting is positively associated with positive affective state but showed a non significant association with job satisfaction. Results further depicted that affect (positive/ negative) significantly mediated the relationships of emotional labor strategies with job satisfaction. To be more specific, negative affective state significantly mediated the negative relationship of surface acting and job satisfaction. Whereas, positive affective state significantly mediated the relationships of deep acting and job satisfaction. Similarly, both the positive and negative affective states were found to be the significant mediators between the relationships of genuine expression of emotions and job satisfaction. The results of the moderated mediation models suggested that strength of mediated relationship of genuine expression of emotions with job satisfaction increases with the presence of supervisory support. However, reverse buffering effect of supervisory support was found in the moderated mediated models of surface acting and job satisfaction. Whereas, supervisory support did not turn out to be a significant moderator between the indirect relationship of deep acting and job satisfaction. Findings of the study are discussed in light of deducing implications for improving emotional management of bank employees.