서비스직원의 감정노동과 소진에 관한 연구

Abstract

As the service sector has grown rapidly, most companies in the service sector have set customer satisfaction as their major strategic objectives, and as a result, the customer orientation and emotional labor of service employees has increasingly become important. Following the emotional display rules of the organization, workers have to manage their real emotions and express the organizationally desired emotions. Due to the discrepancy between their felt and expressed emotions, the workers are likely to experience emotional dissonance which, in turn, leads to job burnout. This study is mainly aimed to examine two research agendas. First, it examines the current states of emotional labor and burnout of the workers in the service sector and analyze the impact of emotional labor on the burnout. Second, it tests whether the self-efficacy and social support, e.g., support from supervisors and coworkers, have a moderating effect on the relationship between emotional labor and burnout. The emotional labor is largely classified into surface acting and deep acting. The former refers to an effort to express a specific kind of emotions demanded by the organization, e.g., being forced to smile even though the individual has a negative feeling. The second refers to an effort of individual to modify his/her inner feelings to match the outer emotions that the organization requires. Burnout refers to physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by chronic stresses among the members of the organization who experience frequent contact with other people. It has the following three types First, an emotional exhaustion occurs when a service provider loses interest, credit, and emotion after consuming all of his/her of emotional resources due to an overwhelming mental and emotional demand. Second, depersonalization occurs when the individual has grown apathetic and cynical about the customers, and treat a customer as an object rather than as a human being. Third, diminished personal accomplishment occurs when the individual realizes that his/her attitude does not meet with the demand from the organization, and subsequently perceive that it is a personal problem of his/her ability, which eventually decreases individual’s feeling of personal accomplishment. Two hypotheses are set for the test in this study. The first is that the more emotional labor the service workers perform, the more burnout they experience. The second is that the self-efficacy and social support play a moderating role in the relationship between emotional labor and burnout. The data were collected from customer-contact employees working in the service sectors, e.g., hotels, call centers, customer service centers, department stores, and banks. A total of 260 questionnaires were distributed from September 27 through 19 October 2007, out of which 234 questionnaires were collected. After excluding 7 cases poorly answered, 227 questionnaires were used in the analysis. The results can be summarized as follows. First, an average emotional labor among the service employees was 3.45, which implies that the employees are performing relatively high degree of emotional labor. Second, among three types of burnout, emotional exhaustion was most frequently experienced by the service employees. Third, the result showed that two types of emotional labor, namely, surface acting and deep acting, had opposite impacts on the burnout. While surface-level emotional labor increased the burnout, deep acting had the effect to reduce the burnout. Fourth, the self-efficacy and social support had no significant moderating effects in the relationship between the emotional labor and burnout. In the mean time, only supervisor’s support had a direct main impact to reduce the burnout. The results suggest several significant implications. First, providing that the roles of service employees are important to gain and maintain the competitive advantage, the organization must understand diverse emotional factors of the employees. The discrepancy between display rules of an organization and employees’ inner emotions should be recognized as a labor that causes physical and mental problems. Second, the training and education program should be focused on enhancing the deep acting to reduce the burnout of employees and to improve the service quality delivered to the customers as well. It would be desirable to revoke self-development and self-achievement through a mind training that deals with emotions of the employees rather than focusing on behavior training and display regulations. Moreover, the display rules should not be considered as a mandatory rule to regulate the behavior of the employees. It should rather be promoted by educating and training the members of the organization so that they can internalize the rules by converting a way of thinking. Third, it is necessary to prepare a supporting system that decreases burnout and stresses caused by emotional labor. For example, an appropriate job rotation can be considered as a way of reducing work pressure. Moreover, encouraging group activities as well as private backstage for refreshment can have a positive effect. Fourth, as the result shows that the support of one’s supervisor reduces the burnout, the leader's role in an organization should be seen as a very important factor. The mentoring system could be considered as a mechanism that can help systemize the support of one’s supervisor, and this could alleviate the burnout by providing moral support to the workers while encouraging internalization of the emotional display rules as well.