Investigating the Impact of Emotional Labor on Customer's Satisfaction in Hotel Industry: The Mediating Role of Employee Satisfaction

Abstract

Along with increasing development of service economy and competition in hotelindustry, emotions accompanied with labor have become important within thisindustry. Surface and deep acting are considered as the strategies for emotionallabor, through which people try to control their own emotions in the workplace.Therefore, present research has been carried out with the aim of studying andexamining the impact of emotional labor on customer's satisfaction through themediating role of job satisfaction in hotel industry.Population of the study consists of employees and customers of 4 and 5 starhotels in Tehran. In order to obtain sample size, Simple Random sampling waywas applied and 385 were selected. This research is regarded as an appliedstudy in terms of purpose and is a descriptive survey in terms of data collecting.In order to analyze data, structural equations' modeling was used.Findings showed that employees' job satisfaction and deep acting have asignificant impact on customer's satisfaction. Surface and deep acting have alsoa significant impact on customer's satisfaction through job satisfaction whilesurface acting has no significant impact on customer's satisfaction Byconsidering this fact that deep acting has a different mechanism in adjustingemotions compared to surface acting, Hotels may consider required trainingplans for employees to strengthen deep acting strategies, through which they canoffer effective deep acting. So, in this way, they can increase costumers’satisfaction

Keywords

• customer's satisfaction
• emotional labor
• job satisfaction
• deep acting
• surface acting