The Effect of a Salesperson's Affectivity and the Performance Stressor on Emotional Labor at the Department Stores

Retail stores with a primary competitive advantage in satisfying customers with high quality differentiated services depend heavily on a sales force to produce and deliver services in a consistent manner. Salespersons in a high service retail context are required to act to express certain types of emotion in compliance with the emotional rules of the organization that is conceptualized as "emotional labor" in the literature. This study adopts the dyadic model of emotional labor originally proposed by Hochschild. A survey method is implemented to collect data to test the hypotheses among the variables such as positive and negative affectivity, performance stressor, emotional labor, burnout, and job satisfaction. One hundred and twelve responses were analyzed by factor analysis and path analysis with SPSS12.0 and Amos 6.0. The factor analysis confirms that emotional labor is composed of deep acting and surface acting. Eleven hypotheses were tested by path analysis and seven were accepted. The major findings are that deep acting was affected by positive affectivity, negative affectivity, and a performance stressor. The surface acting was affected only by negative affectivity. Surface acting had an indirect negative effect on job satisfaction via emotional burnout while deep directly acting influenced job satisfaction. Furthermore, the interaction effect between positive affectivity and a performance stressor on surface acting was significant. The implications for retail firms are discussed based on the findings with suggestions for future studies.