Perceived emotional leadership and prosocial service behavior: the erosion of deep acting’s relative advantage under role overload

Frontline service work requires continuous emotion regulation. However, how emotional leadership relates to service behavior through different emotional labor strategies, and how these relationships vary with workload, remains unclear. Integrating conservation of resources theory and emotional labor theory, this study tested a moderated parallel mediation model in which perceived emotional leadership is associated with prosocial service behavior through surface acting and deep acting, with role overload specified as a moderator at both stages. Using a three-wave time-lagged design with one-month intervals, data were collected from 471 frontline employees of 27 four-star-or-above hotels in five Chinese cities. Perceived emotional leadership was negatively related to surface acting and positively to deep acting, with positive indirect associations through both strategies. The two first-stage associations differed significantly in their sensitivity to role overload: the association with deep acting weakened markedly, whereas the association with surface acting varied little. This finding was consistent across statistical tests. Role overload further weakened the association of deep acting with service behavior, indicating moderation at both stages of this pathway. In an exploratory analysis, the relative advantage of the deep acting pathway, defined as the difference between the two conditional indirect effects, declined between low and high overload, from 0.130 under low role overload to −0.029 under high role overload; because the confidence interval for the high-overload contrast includes zero, a reversal favoring surface acting was not established. These findings show that parallel emotional labor pathways differ in their sensitivity to role overload.