Emotional labor: A two-wave longitudinal person-centered approach

Nguyen, Nathan [UCL] Cheung, Francis Stinglhamber, Florence [UCL]

(eng) To date, scholars advocate adopting a person-centered approach in the study of emotional labor since it gives a more realistic representation of the use of emotional regulation strategies. More importantly, a crucial yet under-explored issue is the understanding of the stability of latent profiles of emotional labor over time. Accordingly, this research aimed to investigate the stability of these profiles, based on workers’ use of surface acting and deep acting, over 3 months. We also analyzed the role of organizational dehumanization, positive affectivity, and negative affectivity in the prediction of profile membership as well as the relationships between these profiles and several job-related outcomes (i.e., job satisfaction, affective commitment, emotional exhaustion, and turnover intentions). Latent profile analyses conducted on a sample of 425 employees revealed five latent profiles of emotional labor that were stable over time. Latent profile transition analyses indicated that most of the employees remained in their initial profile. Organizational dehumanization and negative affectivity, but not positive affectivity, predicted profile membership. Finally, we corroborated that surface actors were related to the worst outcomes, while deep actors were associated with the most adaptive outcomes. As such, these findings provide further evidence to adopt a person-centered approach to the study of emotional labor.