The Effect Of Empowering Leadership On Employees’ Emotional Labor

To win in the evolving service market,one of the key issues that service firms need to address is how to produce excellent services and satisfactory final results.Given that frontline employees’ emotional display during service interactions is a key factor affecting customer service experience,it is common for service firms to require employees to provide "smiling service" through emotional labor to enhance customer service experience.A large body of research on emotional labor suggests that deep acting is more effective in employees’ emotional display and customer satisfaction,while prolonged surface acting may lead to employees being in a conflict between their internal psychological state and outward behavioral disharmony.The issue of choosing emotional labor strategies has become a common concern for academics and service company managers.With the continued advancement of management technology and informatization,flattening has become an important direction of change in the organizational structure,and leaders need to share more power with their subordinates.Recent research has found that empowering leadership positively influences employees’ attitudes and behaviors,while few studies have focused on the relationship between empowering leadership and employees’ emotional labor.Therefore,it is necessary to answer how and why empowering leadership impacts frontline employees’emotional labor.By collating and summarizing the latest research advances on empowering leadership,job crafting and emotional labor,and drawing upon conservation of resources theory and selfdetermination theory,this study explored the relationship between empowering leadership and job crafting,the relationship between job crafting and emotional labor and the mediating role of job crafting.In the sample of 1040 frontline employees from the banking,hospitality,and retail industries,regression results revealed that:(1)Empowering leadership negatively influences frontline employees’ surface acting,but positively affects their deep acting.(2)Empowering leadership has positive effects on employees’ increasing structural job resources,increasing social job resources,increasing challenging job demands,and decreasing hindering job demands.(3)Increasing structural job resources and increasing social job resources both positively affect frontline employees’ deep acting,but negatively impact their surface acting.(4)Increasing structural job resources and increasing social job resources has a significant positive mediating effect on the relationship between empowering leadership and frontline employees’ deep acting,while a significant negative mediating role on the relationship between empowering leadership and surface acting.(5)Increasing challenging job demands does not have a significant impact on either deep acting or surface acting of frontline employees.(6)Decreasing hindering j ob demands has a significant negative effect on frontline employees’ deep acting,but a significant positive effect on their surface acting.(7)Decreasing hindering job demands has a significant negative mediating effect on the relationship between empowering leadership and frontline employees’deep acting,but a significant positive mediating role on the relationship between empowering leadership and frontline employees’ surface acting.This study opens up the transmission mechanism of empowering leadership on frontline employees’ emotional labor and empirically examines the effect of empowering leadership on emotional labor and the mediating role of job crafting in between.We have found a new key to unlocking the "black box" between empowering leadership and frontline employees’emotional labor,opening up a new perspective on emotional labor theory.In addition,the doubleedge sword effect of empowering leadership on frontline employees’ emotional labor is confirmed.The findings explain to some extent the relationship between empowering leadership and emotional labor,clarify the positive internal and external factors influencing frontline employees’ emotional labor,expand the antecedent research on emotional labor,and provide empirical research evidence to address the issue of employees’ emotional labor.