Beyond Surface Smiles: Deep Acting as the Critical Mechanism Linking Leadership, Organizational Citizenship, Service Orientation and Burnout in Hotel Work

Frontline hotel employees are expected to regulate their emotions during customer interactions, making emotional labour a central feature of service work. Although emotional labour has been widely studied, less attention has been given to how leadership styles and discretionary employee behaviours jointly shape emotional regulation strategies and their implications for employee well-being and service outcomes. Drawing on affective events theory and cognitive appraisal theory, this study develops and tests an integrated framework in which deep acting functions as a key mechanism linking leadership style and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) to customer service orientation and burnout among frontline hotel employees, using survey data collected from hotel employees in Malaysia and analysed through structural equation modelling, the findings indicate that transformational leadership and OCB are positively associated with deep acting, which in turn is positively related to customer service orientation and negatively related to burnout. Deep acting partially mediates the relationships between transformational leadership and both customer service orientation and burnout. In contrast, transactional leadership does not significantly influence these outcomes through deep acting. Surface acting is negatively associated with customer service orientation but shows no significant relationship with burnout. The study contributes to labour and management research by demonstrating that emotional labour outcomes are strategy-dependent and shaped by organizational context rather than solely individual coping processes. It further highlights the importance of supportive leadership and discretionary workplace behaviours in fostering sustainable service performance and employee well-being within hospitality organizations.