Emotional Labor Strategies from Customer Point of View: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The behavior displayed by service employees affects customers’ perception of service quality and their level of satisfaction. Therefore, understanding emotional labor strategies has become a key competitive advantage for service organizations. The purpose of this study is to provide an in-depth review studies that discussed and examined emotional labor strategies from customer point of view. This study used a systematic literature review approach on emotional labor studies. The results showed that customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and word of mouth are considered the most important outcomes of emotional labor strategies. Further, the results showed that the majority of previous studies used dyadic questionnaire as a data collection method. More importantly, drawn from the review results, a research framework was developed to show the customer outcomes of emotional labor strategies and the mediators/moderators between emotional labor strategies and customer outcomes. This article is one of the earliest studies that provides a systematic review of previous studies on emotional labor from customer point of view and uncovers the definitions, models, and methods and factors in order to clarify the emotional labor concept.

Keywords: Emotional labor, Surface acting, Deep acting, Customer satisfaction, Customer loyalty, Word of mouth, Systematic literature review, Research framework

DOI: 10.7176/JMCR/57-03

Publication date:June 30^th 2019