Emotional Labor and Effective Performance in Service Industries

Excerpts from the Paper

Emotional Labor and Effective Performance in Service Industries
It is clear that people who work in service industries (e.g. waiters, bartenders, etc.) to some extent ‘perform’ for their customers in order to enhance their opportunities to get more and higher tips. Chi, Grandey and Diamond explore the effectiveness of different performance strategies in two different service industries (restaurant servers and call center employees), particularly in terms of their effectiveness in gaining financial rewards, i.e. tips. They distinguish between two types of performance: “deep acting” and “surface acting”. Among restaurant servers, deep acting was found to result in greater financial gains, while for those who employed the strategy of surface...

.....ristics already possessed by the server. The authors found that the links between surface acting and extraversion were fairly consistent across the two studies. In terms of practical implications, this study tells us that “deep acting is an effective performance strategy, regardless of employees’ personality” (Chi et al. 1344). The authors therefore propose that managers provide training in deep-acting skills to their employees because it can enhance the effectiveness of their performances regardless of their personality disposition.
Works Cited
Chi, Nai-Wen, Alicia Al Grandey and Jennifer A. Diamond. “Want a Tip? Service Performance as a Function of Emotion Regulation and Extraversion.” Journal of Applied Psychology 96.6 (2011): 1337-1346.