The Impact Of Emotional Labor Strategies On Proactive Customer Service Behaviors: The Interaction Between Emotional Labor Strategies And Customer Rudenes

The service industry is a key industry in the modern industry.Within the many categories of service industry,the most representative is the Food service industry.Employees in the Food service industry face customers directly and provide services to them,and they are front-line service industry employees,typically emotional workers.At present,consumers are more and more interested in the experience of consumption,and the concept of consumption is changing from "quality consumption" to "experience consumption",which puts forward higher standards and requirements for Food service enterprises and brings a greater workload and work pressure to Food service employees,making the emotional labour of service staff deeper.The Job Demands Resources Model(JD-R)suggests that emotional labour increases emotional exhaustion and leads to a reduction in psychological resources,and that surface act emotional labour leads to a greater depletion of psychological resources than deep act,ultimately leading to a reduction in Proactive Customer Service Performance.And in the process of serving customers,employees are often confronted with incivility performance from customers,posing greater challenges to their work.The Psychological Resilience Model suggests that protective factors can act as ’buffers’ to reduce the negative impact of risk factors,and that deep acting as a form of emotional regulation can act as a protective factor to reduce the negative impact of customer incivility on Proactive Customer Service Performance.Therefore,this study will explore the effects and mechanisms of emotional labour on Proactive Customer Service Performance and focus on how different emotional labour strategies will interact with customer incivility to influence Proactive Customer Service Performance.Study 1 used 120 frontline employees in the Foodservice industry as subjects and designed a 2 x 2 between-subjects experiment with the dependent variable being Proactive Customer Service Performance.Explore the relationship between emotional labour,customer rudeness and Proactive Customer Service Performance in the simulated scenario.Study 2 investigated two different samples using a large sample questionnaire to explore the interaction between different emotional labour strategies and customer incivility.Study 3 interviewed six randomly selected subjects from the deep-act group in Study 1 to explore possible internal mechanisms from a qualitative research perspective.The following conclusions can be drawn from the three studies:1)Deep act can increase service employees’ Proactive Customer Service Performance.2)The more customer incivility encountered,service employees’ Proactive Customer Service Performance.3)For deep actors,the negative effect of customer incivility on Proactive Customer Service Performance is not significant.This study has certain theoretical implications.1)This study expands the field of research on the Proactive Customer Service Performance,which takes a psychological perspective and focuses on the impact of individual-level emotional factors on Proactive Customer Service Performance.2)This study further considers customer rudeness frequently encountered by staff and explores the performance of Proactive Customer Service Performance in negative contexts.This study also has certain practical significance.1)Improving employees’ Proactive Customer Service Performance is beneficial to employees’ personal career development,customers’ consumption satisfaction and companies’ industry competitiveness.2)Deep acting can be intervened to help employees cope with emotional labour dilemmas and customer incivility,thereby increasing job satisfaction,service initiative and business performance.The shortcoming of this study is that Study 3 used qualitative research to explore the mechanisms of deep acting,but failed to obtain a clear causal relationship from a quantitative perspective.