Managing Customer Services: Emotional Labor in Service Delivery

As the importance of service sectors in the world economy has been continuously increasing, customer service has become a topic of interest to organizational scholars in recent years. This study is conducted using questionnaire responses to explore the relationship among difficult customer, emotional labor and turnover intention. It also tests the moderating effect of coworker support and supervisor support in this model. The data was collected from 286 customer-contact employees in hospitality industry including the food services, accommodations, recreation, and entertainment sectors. The results of correlation analysis and linear regression analysis indicate that (1) Difficult customer has a significant correlation with emotional labor and turnover intention. (2) Deep acting, one dimension of emotional labor, mediates the impact of difficult customer on turnover intention. (3) Coworker support moderates the impact of difficult customer on emotional labor, but the moderating effect of supervisor support is not significant. Finally, the theoretical progresses and practical implications of this paper are discussed. The study contributes to the literature on emotional labor and the findings of study have indications for human resources management in service sectors.