SHARED DISPLAY RULES AND EMOTIONAL LABOR IN WORK TEAMS

Abstract

Emotions are an important part of the workplace. Emotional labor describes the monitoring and management of one's emotions at work. Employees perform emotional labor in response to explicit and perceived display rules for emotional expressions in the workplace. While compliance with these rules is generally beneficial for the organization, it may be detrimental to employee well-being.This study proposes a process model of emotional labor that extends from display rules to job attitudes and behaviors. It is unique in that it investigates display rules and emotional labor at the group level of analysis. It also includes coworkers as well as customers as targets of emotional labor. Display rule commitment is proposed as an important moderator between emotional labor and important individual job attitudes and behaviors that may account for previously mixed findings in the literature.The hypotheses of this study received general support. Specifically, group level display rules and emotional labor were viable constructs that had important consequences for job outcomes. Display rule commitment was an important predictor of job attitudes and behaviors and moderated the relationship between group level surface acting and emotional exhaustion. In addition, group level emotional labor showed a significant effect on a number of important job outcomes. It also moderated the relationship between individual level emotional labor and job attitudes and behaviors. These findings provide several promising new insights and directions for emotional labor research.