Antecedents and Consequences of Emotional Labor in Head Coaches of NCAA Division I Program

Emotional labor, defined as the regulation of both feelings and emotions to be effective in jobs (Hochschild, 1983), is a topic that has not been addressed adequately in sport management literature. Hochschild (1983) identified two emotional labor strategies including surface acting (managing outward expressions to show appropriate emotions) and deep acting (trying to experience appropriate feelings before expressing them). Zapf (2002) also argued that automatic regulation (expressing appropriate emotions naturally in a given situation) is the third category of emotional labor strategies. It is a critical issue when we consider that sport management is concerned with production of services the quality of which is largely determined by regulations of emotions by both parties in the employee-client interface. The significance of emotional labor is even greater in the case of those service providers who are also in leadership positions as in the case of coaches and athletes. The coach-athlete relationship of intercollegiate athletics may be the relevant area to investigate the nature of emotional labor in the sport setting.;This study investigated a working model of emotional labor in coach-athlete relationship. The proposed model identified emotional intelligence (Mayer & Salovey, 1997) and affectivity (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) as potential antecedents of a coaches' choice of emotional labor strategy. The current study also investigated the differential impact of the emotional labor strategies on the individual outcomes of emotional exhaustion (Maslach, 1982) and job satisfaction. To achieve this goal, the study was performed in two stages. In the first stage, psychometric properties of the scales used for pilot tested. Based on the result from the pilot study, the questionnaires were refined to improve their psychometric properties. In the second stage, the confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were employed to test the proposed hypotheses.;Using census method, questionnaires were distributed to coaches at NCAA Division I universities in the United State via online. The results revealed that positive affectivity negatively predicted all of the emotional labor strategies including surface acting, deep acting, and automatic regulation while negative affectivity predicted only surface acting negatively. Emotional intelligence predicted only automatic regulation.;Regarding the consequences of emotional labor, surface acting positively predicted emotional exhaustion and negatively predicted job satisfaction. On the other side, automatic regulation was negatively associated with emotional exhaustion and positively associated with job satisfaction. However, it was found that deep acting had no relationship with consequences. Finding discussed and practical implication, limitations, and directions for future research were presented.