James M. Diefendorff

Emotional display rules and emotional labor : The moderating role of commitment

The authors examined whether commitment to emotional display rules is a necessary condition for emotional display rules to affect behavior at work. Results using structural equation modeling revealed that display rule commitment moderated the relationships of emotional display rule perceptions with surface acting, deep acting, and positive affective delivery at work, such that the relationships were strong and positive when commitment to display rules was high and weak when commitment to display rules was low. These findings suggest that motivation plays a role in the emotional labor process in that individuals must be committed to display rules for these rules to affect behavior.

Are emotional display rules formal job requirements? Examination of employee and supervisor perceptions

This study explored whether emotional display rules are perceived by part-time employees and their supervisors as formal job requirements. Results showed that display-related behaviours were thought to be required activities (i.e. in-role) by the majority of the sample, and that employees and supervisors generally agreed in this perception. Job-based differences in interpersonal requirements predicted the extent to which employees and supervisors categorized display-related behaviours as required, with more interpersonal requirements being associated with greater in-role categorization. Job-based differences in interpersonal requirements also predicted the level of agreement between employees and supervisors in categorizing display-related behaviours as in-role or extra-role. Finally, job satisfaction and job involvement predicted the extent to which employees categorized emotional display behaviours as being required in their jobs, with more satisfied and more involved individuals rating emotional display behaviours as in-role at a higher rate than less satisfied and less involved individuals.

The relations of motivational traits with workplace deviance.

The authors developed and tested new theoretical relations between approach and avoidance motivational traits and deviant work behaviors. Approach motivation was divided into 3 traits: personal mastery (i.e., desire to achieve), competitive excellence (i.e., desire to perform better than others), and behavioral activation system (BAS) sensitivity (i.e., responsiveness to rewards). Avoidance motivation, which reflects ones sensitivity to negative stimuli and the desire to escape such stimuli, was conceptualized as a unitary construct. Using structural equation modeling, the authors examined the relations of these 4 motivational traits with interpersonal and organizational deviance in a sample of primarily part-time employees. For the approach motivation traits, results showed that personal mastery was negatively related to interpersonal and organizational deviance, BAS sensitivity was positively related to interpersonal and organizational deviance, and competitive excellence was unrelated to both types of workplace deviance. Finally, avoidance motivation was positively related to organizational deviance and interacted with organizational constraints to predict interpersonal deviance.

Emotional Labor Actors: A Latent Profile Analysis of Emotional Labor Strategies

Research on emotional labor focuses on how employees utilize 2 main regulation strategies-surface acting (i.e., faking ones felt emotions) and deep acting (i.e., attempting to feel required emotions)-to adhere to emotional expectations of their jobs. To date, researchers largely have considered how each strategy functions to predict outcomes in isolation. However, this variable-centered perspective ignores the possibility that there are subpopulations of employees who may differ in their combined use of surface and deep acting. To address this issue, we conducted 2 studies that examined surface acting and deep acting from a person-centered perspective. Using latent profile analysis, we identified 5 emotional labor profiles-non-actors, low actors, surface actors, deep actors, and regulators-and found that these actor profiles were distinguished by several emotional labor antecedents (positive affectivity, negative affectivity, display rules, customer orientation, and emotion demands-abilities fit) and differentially predicted employee outcomes (emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and felt inauthenticity). Our results reveal new insights into the nature of emotion regulation in emotional labor contexts and how different employees may characteristically use distinct combinations of emotion regulation strategies to manage their emotional expressions at work.