Emotion Cycles in Services: Emotional Contagion and Emotional Labor Effects

Service organizations encourage employees to express positive emotions in service encounters, in the hope that customers “catch” these emotions and react positively. Yet customer and employee emotions could be mutually influential. To understand emotional exchanges in service encounters and their influences on customer outcomes, the current study models the interplay of emotional contagion and emotional labor, as well as their influence on customer satisfaction. Employees might catch customers’ emotions and transmit those emotions back to customers through emotional contagion, and employee emotional labor likely influences this cycle by modifying the extent to which emotional contagion occurs. Data from 268 customer-employee dyads, gathered from a large chain of foot massage parlors, confirm the existence of an emotion cycle. Deep acting, as one type of emotional labor used by employees, hinders the transmission of negative emotions to customers, whereas surface acting facilitates it. Both customer emotions and employee emotional labor thus have critical influences on service encounters. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the potential influence of customer preservice emotions and the presence of an emotion cycle during service delivery.