Customer (in) Justice And Employee's Emotion Work: The Mediation Effect Of Emotion

Work-related emotion was a focus problem in advanced psychology research. Influenced by customer service orientation such as"The customer is always right","The customer is God", servicers should show happy and active emotion when they were interacting with customers, which has became an explicit requirement for the service enterprises, many enterprises also regard this as the competencies of the people engaged in service personals. For the servicers, in order to complete their work effectively, besides intelligence and physical labor, they also need to regulate their emotion and expression, display specific expression, just like self-presentation on the stage, to leave customers good impressions. Employee's emotion expression was not only their own matter, but also connected closely with the organization requirement. The special task that the employees regulate their emotion expression according to the organization anticipation was called emotion work.There was evidence that the high intensity emotion work can lower work efficiency, job satisfaction, increase burnout, and heighten negative health symptoms .Therefore, it is of important meaning to explore and analyze the factors that affect employee emotion work for maintenance of the employee's physical and mental health and organization's healthy development. According to Grandey emotion work model, the individual characteristic, the organization characteristic, and the situation variables were three kinds of antecedent variables that affected individual emotion work. But organization characteristic researches focus on the factors such as occupation requirement, the authority supervision, self-monitoring with few consideration of organization justice- individual organizational understanding.Based on affective events theory, this research simulated 8 different customer justice scenarios, examined 160 China mobile company operators'emotion work from the view of customer justice, one source of individual justice, and analysis the mediation effect of emotion between customer (in)justice and employee's emotion work. Results showed that:1. In scenarios of customer-direct (in)justice, coming from the customer-direct justice will have a main effect on employee emotion work. That is, individuals who have been fairly treated by customers will expend less effort to comply with emotion work as compared with individuals treated unfairly by customers.2. In scenarios of coworker-direct customer (in)justice, coming from coworker-direct customer will have a main effect on employee emotion work. That is, coworkers who have been fairly treated by customers, employee will expend less effort to comply with emotion work as compared with coworker treated unfairly by customers.3. Employees emotion work had no significant difference among the scenarios of customer direct injustice-coworker direct customer justice, customer direct justice- coworker direct customer injustice, both injustice. But individuals experience higher levels of emotional work in the following three conditions: customer direct injustice-coworker direct customer justice, customer direct justice- coworker direct customer injustice, both injustices as compared with a condition where both the self and coworker are treated fairly.4. Justice significant positive correlation to emotion. In justice scenarios individual will report positive emotion, while, in injustice scenarios individual will report negative emotion. Emotion was the mediator variable between customer justice and emotion work. Higher emotion will reduce the influence of injustice affecting emotion work.