This study aims to examine the effects of emotional labor on job satisfaction among e-commerce customer service employees and to empirically verify the mediating role of resilience in this relationship. Emotional labor was conceptualized as two distinct dimensions -surface acting and deep acting- while job satisfaction and resilience were treated as key outcome and mediating variables. Data were collected through an online survey administered to customer service employees working in e-commerce firms across South Korea, yielding 286 valid responses for analysis. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS 25.0, employing reliability and validity tests, correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis, and a three-step mediation analysis. The results indicate that surface acting has a significant negative effect on job satisfaction, whereas deep acting has a significant positive effect. Additionally, surface acting negatively influences resilience, while deep acting positively affects resilience. Resilience, in turn, was found to have a significant positive effect on job satisfaction. Furthermore, the mediation analysis revealed that resilience partially mediates the relationships between emotional labor (both surface acting and deep acting) and job satisfaction. These findings suggest that emotional labor not only directly influences job satisfaction but also indirectly affects it through the psychological resource of resilience. This study contributes to the literature by extending emotional labor research to the e-commerce service context and provides practical implications for human resource management, emphasizing the importance of fostering resilience and promoting deep acting strategies to enhance job satisfaction among customer service employees
Young‐Sik Park (Sat,) studied this question.