A call for preventing interpersonal stressors at work.

This is an introduction to the special issue "Preventing Interpersonal Stressors at Work." The articles in this special issue are organized into three main themes: (a) factors that stop the vicious cycle of experiencing- enacting interpersonal stressors, (b) multilevel work conditions that reduce interpersonal stressors, and (c) evidence for interventions to reduce interpersonal work stressors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

A perfect storm: Customer sexual harassment as a joint function of financial dependence and emotional labor.

Sexual harassment from customers is prevalent and costly to service employees and organizations, yet little is known about when and why customers harass. Based on a theoretical model of power in organizations, we propose that sexual harassment is a function of employees' financial dependence on customers (i.e., tips) and deference to customers with emotional labor ("service with a smile") jointly activating customer power. With a field survey study of tipped employees who vary in financial dependence and emotional display requirements (Study 1), and an online experiment that manipulates financial dependence and emotional displays from the customer's perspective (Study 2), our results confirm that these contextual factors jointly increase customer power and thus sexual harassment. Our research has important practical implications, suggesting that organizations can reduce customer sexual harassment by changing compensation models or emotional labor expectations in service contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

"A blessing and a curse": Work loss during coronavirus lockdown on short-term health changes via threat and recovery.

The coronavirus pandemic resulted in national lockdown orders, followed by employment changes to reduce labor costs. We assess how health varied for hospitality workers due to the lockdown (i.e., comparing health a month before to a month after), employment change (i.e., comparing those with loss vs. no change), and employee response (i.e., more job threat vs. more personal recovery). Comparing pre- and post-lockdown surveys of 137 U.S. and U.K. hospitality employees, psychological health (i.e., negative and positive affect) worsened but physical health (i.e., symptoms and sleep) improved. We proposed those facing work loss (66% had reduced hours, furloughs, or layoffs) had more job threat but also more personal recovery (i.e., relaxation, mastery, exercise), resulting in opposing pathways to health. Results from a path analysis showed that work loss indirectly linked to higher psychological distress due to job threat, but to lower distress and fewer physical symptoms due to relaxation. Regardless of work loss, mastery (e.g., hobbies) was related to immediate changes in positive affect and sleep, while exercise did not have short-term health benefits. Further, recovery benefits from work loss were short-lived; only job threat carried the effect to psychological distress 2 months later. We offer quotes from the hospitality workers to contextualize the blessing and curse of work loss during the lockdown for these particularly vulnerable employees. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Does sleep help or harm managers' perceived productivity? Trade-offs between affect and time as resources.

Managers often do not get the recommended amount of sleep needed for proper functioning. Based on conservation of resources theory, we suggest that this is a result of sleep having both resource gains (improved affect) and losses (less time) that compete to determine managers' perceived productivity the next day. This trade-off may, in turn, determine the amount of investment in sleep the next night. In a diary study with hotel managers, we found support for sleep as resource loss. After nights with more sleep than usual, managers reported lower perceived productivity due to fewer hours spent at work. In fact, for every hour spent sleeping, managers reported working 31 min, 12 s less. Further, when perceived productivity is reduced managers withdraw and conserve their resources by getting more sleep the next night (12 min, 36 s longer for each scale point decrease in perceived productivity), consistent with loss spirals from conservation of resources theory. Exploratory analyses revealed that sleep has a curvilinear effect on affect, such that too little or too much sleep is not beneficial. Overall, our study demonstrates the often-ignored trade-offs of sleep in terms of affect and work time, which has downstream implications for managers' perceived productivity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

From cheery to "cheers"? Regulating emotions at work and alcohol consumption after work.

Emotional labor, or regulating emotions as part of one's work role, is needed for performance yet may come with far-reaching costs to employee health and performance. Based on ego depletion theorizing, we propose that on days employees perform more surface acting (i.e., faking positive and hiding negative emotional expressions), they will consume more alcohol later-due to reduced self-control (i.e., depletion). In 2 studies, public-facing employees completed multiple assessments per day for 2 weeks. Study 1 showed that surface acting had no direct or indirect effect on alcohol use via depletion, nor via negative mood as an alternative measure of depletion. Study 2 demonstrated that surface acting directly increased subsequent drinking only for those with high emotional demands, but not through depletion. Across both studies, daily deep acting (i.e., modifying emotions to feel positive) consistently predicted less alcohol consumption, but this did not occur through depletion. Study 2 provided evidence for an alternative, motivational shift explanation-a reduced motive to detach from work after regulating by deep acting-rather than self-control capacity. These findings contribute to debate on ego depletion theory by providing insightful field evidence, while demonstrating when emotional labor is likely to help or harm employees' health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

When are fakers also drinkers? A self-control view of emotional labor and alcohol consumption among U.S. service workers.

Some employees tend to drink more alcohol than other employees, with costs to personal and organizational well-being. Based on a self-control framework, we propose that emotional labor with customers-effortfully amplifying, faking, and suppressing emotional expressions (i.e., surface acting)-predicts alcohol consumption, and that this relationship varies depending on job expectations for self-control (i.e., autonomy) and personal self-control traits (i.e., impulsivity). We test these predictions with data drawn from a national probability sample of U.S. workers, focusing on employees with daily contact with outsiders (N = 1,592). The alcohol outcomes included heavy drinking and drinking after work. Overall, surface acting was robustly related to heavy drinking, even after controlling for demographics, job demands, and negative affectivity, consistent with an explanation of impaired self-control. Surface acting predicted drinking after work only for employees with low self-control jobs or traits; this effect was exacerbated for those with service encounters (i.e., customers and the public) and buffered for those with service relationships (i.e., patients, students, and clients). We discuss what these results mean for emotional labor and propose directions for helping the large segment of U.S. employees in public facing occupations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The state of the heart: Emotional labor as emotion regulation reviewed and revised.

Emotional labor has been an area of burgeoning research interest in occupational health psychology in recent years. Emotional labor was conceptualized in the early 1980s by sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983) as occupational requirements that alienate workers from their emotions. Almost 2 decades later, a model was published in Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (JOHP) that viewed emotional labor through a psychological lens, as emotion regulation strategies that differentially relate to performance and wellbeing. For this anniversary issue of JOHP, we review the emotional labor as emotion regulation model, its contributions, limitations, and the state of the evidence for its propositions. At the heart of our article, we present a revised model of emotional labor as emotion regulation, that incorporates recent findings and represents a multilevel and dynamic nature of emotional labor as emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record

Rising to the challenge: Deep acting is more beneficial when tasks are appraised as challenging.

Cumulative research indicates that deep acting has a nonsignificant relationship with employee exhaustion, despite arguments that deep acting can be beneficial. To illuminate when deep acting leads to more positive employee outcomes, we draw on the resource conservation perspective to propose a within-individual model of deep acting that focuses on service employees' daily fluctuation of emotional labor and emotional exhaustion. Specifically, we propose that the ongoing experience of felt challenge is a within-person boundary condition that moderates deep acting's relationship with emotional exhaustion, and model emotional exhaustion as a mediating mechanism that subsequently predicts momentary job satisfaction and daily customer conflict handling. Using an experience sampling design, we collected data from 84 service employees over a 3-week period. Deep acting was less emotionally exhausting for service providers when they saw their tasks as more challenging. Furthermore, emotional exhaustion mediated the deep acting by felt challenge interaction effect on momentary job satisfaction and daily customer conflict handling. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the deep acting experience at work, while highlighting customer conflict handling as a key behavioral outcome of emotional labor.

Workplace surface acting and marital partner discontent: Anxiety and exhaustion spillover mechanisms.

Surface acting (i.e., faking and suppressing emotions at work) is repeatedly linked to employee negative moods and emotional exhaustion, but the consequences may also go beyond work boundaries. We provide a unique theoretical integration of these 2 emotional labor consequences with 2 work-to-family conflict mechanisms, mood spillover and resource drain, to explain why surface acting is likely to create marital partner discontent (i.e., partner's perceived work-to-family conflict and desire for the employee to quit). A survey of 197 hotel managers and their marital partners supported that managers' surface acting was directly related to their partner wanting them to quit, and indirectly to partner's perception of work-to-family conflict via exhaustion consistent with the resource drain mechanism. Anxiety from surface acting had an indirect mediating effect on marital partner discontent through exhaustion. Importantly, controlling for dispositional negativity and job demands did not weaken these effects. Implications for theory and future research integrating work-family and emotional labor are discussed.

On the front lines: Stakeholder threat cues determine how identified employees cope with scandal.

When organizational identity is threatened as a result of scandal, highly identified members who represent the threatened organization to stakeholders have a particularly challenging and overlooked experience. Addressing a theoretical paradox, we propose that organizational identification interacts with the threat cues from stakeholders to determine employee responses. We conducted a multimethod, in vivo test of these ideas with university fundraising employees after events threatened the university's moral identity. Interview and archival data demonstrated that stakeholders expressed identity threat to fundraisers, who experienced their own identity-related distress and engaged in both group-dissociative and group-affirming responses. Surveys of professional and student university fundraisers demonstrated that more identified employees were more distressed (e,g., felt anxious, grief, betrayed) regardless of stakeholder threat cues. Yet, when employees perceived weak threat cues from stakeholders, more identified members were less likely to dissociate from the group and more likely to affirm the group's positive identity with stakeholders. These benefits of identification were not present when the stakeholder threat cues were strong. We discuss future research and practical implications of front-line employee identification and stakeholder cues during scandal.

Want a tip? Service performance as a function of emotion regulation and extraversion.

Surface acting and deep acting with customers are strategies for service performance, but evidence for their effectiveness is limited and mixed. We propose that deep acting is an effective strategy for most employees, whereas surface acting's effect on performance effectiveness depends on employee extraversion. In Study 1, restaurant servers who tended to use deep acting exceeded their customers' expectations and had greater financial gains (i.e., tips) regardless of extraversion, whereas surface acting improved tips only for extraverts, not for introverts. In Study 2, a call center simulation, deep acting improved emotional performance and increased the likelihood of extrarole service behavior beyond the direct and interactive effects of extraversion and other Big Five traits. In contrast, surface acting reduced emotional performance for introverts and not extraverts, but only during the extrarole interaction. We discuss implications for incorporating traits into emotional labor research and practice.

Emotional display rules as work unit norms: a multilevel analysis of emotional labor among nurses.

Emotional labor theory has conceptualized emotional display rules as shared norms governing the expression of emotions at work. Using a sample of registered nurses working in different units of a hospital system, we provided the first empirical evidence that display rules can be represented as shared, unit-level beliefs. Additionally, controlling for the influence of dispositional affectivity, individual-level display rule perceptions, and emotion regulation, we found that unit-level display rules are associated with individual-level job satisfaction. We also showed that unit-level display rules relate to burnout indirectly through individual-level display rule perceptions and emotion regulation strategies. Finally, unit-level display rules also interacted with individual-level dispositional affectivity to predict employee use of emotion regulation strategies. We discuss how future research on emotional labor and display rules, particularly in the health care setting, can build on these findings.

Customer incivility as a social stressor: the role of race and racial identity for service employees.

Experiencing frequent incivility from customers is a noted social stressor linked with job burnout. Race (as a surface-level characteristic and as a deep-level identity) is proposed to explain emotional exhaustion, the primary burnout dimension, for service employees. The authors did not find that "microaggressions" were more likely toward racial minorities, nor any difference in job-related exhaustion between racial minority (primarily African American) and nonminority (White) retail employees. However, the centrality of minority employees' racial identity strengthened the association of customer incivility with emotional exhaustion because of increased stress appraisals, consistent with the Group Identity Lens Model. Proposals for future research on workforce racial diversity are made.

Display rules versus display autonomy: emotion regulation, emotional exhaustion, and task performance in a call center simulation.

"Service with a smile" is satisfying for the customer, but such display rules may be costly to the employee and the organization. Most previous research on such costs has used self-reported and cross-sectional designs. The authors use an experimental approach to test tenets of resource depletion theories; specifically, whether the self-regulation of emotions required by display rules depletes energy and attentional resources during a service encounter. Using a call center simulation with three "customer" interactions, the authors found that participants given positive display rules (e.g., be enthusiastic and hide frustration) reported more postsimulation exhaustion and made more errors on the order form compared to those with display autonomy. Customer hostility during one of the calls also increased exhaustion overall and the number of errors during that specific call, though proposed interactions with display rules were not supported. Surface-level emotion regulation, but not deep-level, was the mechanism for the energy depletion effect of display rules, while display rules had a direct effect on performance decrements. Theoretical and practical implications for display rules as part of job requirements are discussed.

Verbal abuse from outsiders versus insiders: comparing frequency, impact on emotional exhaustion, and the role of emotional labor.

Research on aggression from organizational outsiders (customers, clients or patients) has ignored insider-instigated aggression, and has been limited to employees in emotional labor jobs (e.g., social work and customer services). The authors argue that customer-employee interactions have distinct characteristics from organizational insider interactions, and provide two studies to compare the frequency and strain of verbal abuse from customers, supervisors and coworkers. Furthermore, they assess whether customer verbal abuse is only a critical issue for employees in jobs requiring emotional labor, measured with both O*NET job codes and self-reported display rules. With a national random sample of U.S. employees (n = 2446) and a convenience sample of U.S. employees who have customer contact (n = 121), the authors find that verbal abuse from outsiders (1) occurs more frequently than insider verbal abuse, particularly for those with higher emotional labor requirements, and (2) predicts emotional exhaustion over and above insider verbal abuse, regardless of emotional labor requirements. The authors conclude that better integration of customer aggression and insider aggression research is needed.

Must "service with a smile" be stressful? The moderating role of personal control for American and French employees.

Suppressing and faking emotional expressions depletes personal resources and predicts job strain for customer-contact employees. The authors argue that personal control over behavior, in the job and within the national culture, provides compensatory resources that reduce this strain. With a survey study of 196 employees from the United States and France, the authors supported that high job autonomy buffered the relationship of emotion regulation with emotional exhaustion and, to a lesser extent, job dissatisfaction. The relationship of emotion regulation with job dissatisfaction also depended on the emotional culture; the relationship was weaker for French customer-contact employees who were proposed to have more personal control over expressions than U.S. employees. Theoretical and research implications for the emotion regulation literature and practical suggestions for minimizing job strain are proposed.

Relationship between coping, cognitive dysfunction and depression in multiple sclerosis.

Given its relatively high prevalence, one possible source of stress for patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) is cognitive dysfunction. The authors' study was guided by a new theoretical model suggesting that cognitive dysfunction in MS may be most likely to lead to depression when patients use high levels of avoidance coping and/or low levels of active coping. To test this model, 55 patients with definite MS were administered a neuropsychological battery and measures of depression and coping. Consistent with predictions, regression analyses showed that coping significantly moderated the relationship between cognitive dysfunction and depression. Specifically, cognitive dysfunction was most likely to be associated with depression when patients used either high levels of avoidance or low levels of active coping. Implications of these data for clinical applications and for our theoretical conceptualization are discussed and limitations of the model explored.