Organizational Consequences and Individual Antecedents of Emotional Dissonance and Emotional Labor

Abstract

This study reports the results of two research surveys, conducted in big administrative entities and covering nearly 400 employees. It confirms some of the previous findings, showing that – generally – emotional dissonance affects negatively job performance, commitment and satisfaction. It also proves that individual differences play an important role as pre-requisites of emotional labor, thus mediating the effect of emotional dissonance on levels of job performance, job satisfaction and intention to quit. When it comes to individual differences as antecedents of emotional labor, researchers’ interest by now has been focused almost entirely on the “big five” model. The results in practically all of these cases are often quite surprising and contradictory. Here an alternative, more conservative and more productive approach to individual differences is used and the results show, for example, that performance of employees belonging to the “T” type in Jung’s typology, and scoring high on “Power” value dimension (Schwartz), is less affected by emotional dissonance than performance of their “F” and “Low-power” colleagues. Emotional dissonance may cause different levels of emotional labor in different personalities depending on their motivation, cognitive style and values, and eventually may have considerably different impact on their job performance and job satisfaction.

Keywords: emotional dissonance, emotional labor, job performance, individual differences