The Interplay of Self-Construal and Service Co-Workers’ Attitudes in Shaping Emotional Labor Under Customer Injustice

TL;DR

This study explores how employees' self-construal and coworkers' attitudes affect emotional labor when dealing with unfair customers.

Contribution

It introduces a triadic model integrating self-construal and coworkers' attitudes to explain emotional labor in service settings.

Findings

Interdependent individuals are more likely to use surface acting in response to customer injustice.

Service co-workers' attitudes significantly influence deep acting for interdependent employees.

The study proposes a dual-path framework linking intrapersonal and interpersonal factors in emotional labor.

Abstract

Previous discussions on customer injustice and emotional labor have primarily focused on employee–customer dyads, often neglecting the role of service co-workers in shaping emotional labor dynamics. To address this gap, the current study integrates intrapersonal and interpersonal factors to explore their joint effects on employees’ emotional labor strategies when encountering customer injustice. A full-factorial experimental design with 2 (self-construal: independent vs. interdependent) × 3 (service co-workers: alone vs. positive attitudes vs. negative attitudes toward customer injustice) is employed, using data from 179 frontline service employees at high-star hotels in Shanghai, with self-construal and service co-workers operationalized as manipulated conditions. Results reveal that self-construal significantly influences surface acting: interdependent individuals are more inclined to engage in surface acting than independent individuals. By contrast, self-construal has no direct effect on deep acting. While service co-workers do not moderate the relationship between self-construal and surface acting, they play a critical role in the relationship between self-construal and deep acting: for interdependent employees, service co-workers’ attitudes (rather than their mere presence) decisively impact deep acting, with positive attitudes promoting deeper emotional engagement and negative attitudes reducing it. This study advances a dual-path framework highlighting how intrapersonal dispositions (self-construal) and interpersonal impression cues (service co-workers’ attitudes) interact to shape emotional labor. By expanding the traditional employee–customer dyad to a triadic model, the study bridges impression management theory and workplace injustice research, offering theoretical insights into how intrapersonal traits and interpersonal dynamics jointly shape contextualized emotional labor. This thereby provides a theoretical foundation for nuanced management strategies in service organizations.

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