Customer response toward employees’ emotional labor in service industry settings

Abstract

In the current study, we develop and test a moderated mediation model that explores the mechanisms that underlie the influence of employees' emotional labor on customer loyalty by considering affective reactions and cognitive appraisals simultaneously and illustrating moderating factors that alter their effectiveness. A sample of 259 individuals from across the United States over 20 years old were recruited on Amazon's Mechanical Turk to participate in the survey. Our emotions as social information based model clarifies the distinct roles of customers' detection of employees' deep acting and surface acting in influencing customers' affective reactions and cognitive appraisals. The current research also reveals that impact of customers' detection of employees' emotional labor on customer outcomes varies as a function of the employees' nonverbal communication.