The Moderating Effect Of Perceived Organizational Support On The Impact Emotional Labor Has On Job Burnout

The concept of emotional labor was introduced by Hochschild (1979,1983) and is defined as "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display." Since then, many scholars have researches into the area. The service workers drew more attention by researchers. Psychological researches tend to look at the psychological impact caused by emotional labor on individuals. Organizational researches tend to look at how emotional labor affects organizational performance, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Although service industry is growing fast in China, there are few studies on emotional labor, and fewer from organizational perspective. Therefore, one purpose of this study is to explore more on emotional labor, and to attract more attention on this subject from scholars and entrepreneurs.Existing researches have shown that emotional labor affects individuals' psychological health and organizations' performance. Psychological researches paid more attention to workers' psychological health, while as an organizational study, this study paid more attention to organizational factors. Therefore, the second purpose of this study is to find out what the organization should do during the emotional labor process.To summarize, this study attempts to answer two questions. First, how does emotional labor affect job burnout ? Second, how does perceived organizational support affect this effect ? Quantitative research approach was used to examine the casual relationships among important variables and moderating effects. Findings suggested that emotional labor induces job burnout. Furthermore, perceived organizational support buffers the effects of emotional labor on the job burnout.