2.1. Defining Emotional Labor
Emotional labor refers to a process by which employees must manage their emotions to meet organizational rules for emotional displays or norms concerning the appropriate emotional reactions in specific situations [
10]. Two emotional labor strategies have been identified: (1) surface acting refers to employees’ modification of only their observable expressions in order to adhere to expectations about emotional expression, and (2) deep acting involves the modification of both felt and underlying emotions to adhere to rules about emotional expression [
6].
In surface acting, employees change their observable features, gestures, facial expressions, or vocal tones, whereas in deep acting, they change both these observable features and their unobservable inner states [
11]. Of these forms of emotional labor, passive acting and deep acting are believed to provide better and more positive outcomes for both service providers and customers [
9,
12]. A large body of cross-sectional and longitudinal research [
13,
14] has documented that surface acting negatively affects employees’ job satisfaction and leads to emotional exhaustion. Surface acting aims to alter the outward emotional expression without changing the actual feeling. It involves the suppression of negative emotions and mimicry of positive emotional expression for jobs that require positive displays of emotion [
4]. Surface acting may affect employee well-being in general, emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction in particular. This is because surface acting is effortful, depletes mental resources, undermines employees’ sense of authenticity, and hampers positive social interactions with customers [
13,
15,
16,
17]. Evidence has revealed that employees frequently engage in surface acting, especially when they interact with unpleasant clients and confront stress and anger [
18,
19,
20].
Deep acting involves the regulation of feelings to seem authentic, whereas surface acting involves the regulation of emotional expression to fulfill job duties. During deep acting, people regulate the precursors of emotion (i.e., they use antecedent-focused regulation) by modifying their perception of the situation. Deep acting is believed to provide positive and better outcomes for both service providers and customers [
9,
12]. Kim [
12], for example, revealed that emotional labor does not cause burnout among hotel service personnel, especially when they sincerely try to have appropriate emotions (deep acting) rather than project false ones (surface acting). Evidence also implies that deep acting is more efficacious than surface acting for the performance and well-being of customer service employees [
21]. Both deep and surface acting involve attempts to display the required emotions: surface acting changes the focus of thoughts to things that induce the required emotions, while deep acting changes the cognitive basis for emotions. For example, regulating emotion using deep acting, such as recalling pleasant memories, can eliminate feelings of sadness [
13,
22]. Thus, emotional labor does not cause burnout among hotel service personnel, especially when they sincerely try to have the appropriate emotions (deep acting) rather than adopting false ones (surface acting).
2.2. Construct of Well-Being
Well-being is a good psychological state of employees in their own fields of work. It can reflect the level of individual psychological arousal and is an effective index for measuring mental health. The construct of well-being includes (1) individual well-being, which relates to job satisfaction and burnout, and (2) organizational well-being, which relates to performance and withdrawal behaviors [
21]. Employees’ job well-being can increase their attention and cognitive ranges [
23] and enhance their self-efficacy [
24]. Individual motivation can affect well-being. Waterman [
25] proposed that different tasks are associated with different types of well-being. Individuals’ pursuit of goals consistent with their internal motives generate higher satisfaction. Social support in interpersonal relationships positively impacts well-being [
26]. Social support also provides employees with an opportunity to modify their emotions and maintain good emotions when coping with stress. Obtaining organizational support can encourage employees to devote more energy to their work. Of course, stress from being overworked can reduce employees’ well-being, which may occur because of the emotional disorder caused by work stress, leading to a decline in employee job satisfaction.
Because young people are choosing to bank online, front-line bank staff in China often complain of high stress and poor well-being because they are faced with an increasing number of older, “offline” consumers. The elderly are respected in the Chinese culture and require more patience, which increases the pressure on front-line bank staff. Our research aimed to explore the mechanism between emotional labor and well-being to improve the well-being of front-line bank staff by developing emotional skills. Much evidence has suggested that emotional labor influences individuals’ well-being, which is considered an indicator of psychological health [
27]. Initial evidence has suggested that burnout is a response related to frequent social and emotional interaction with clients [
22]. Emotion regulation using surface acting is negatively related to well-being [
22,
28], and emotion regulation with deep acting is positively related to well-being [
13,
21,
22,
28]. A large number of studies have found that emotional labor not only leads to a decline in employee well-being, but also causes job burnout, which greatly reduces job satisfaction. Grandey [
13] showed that employees who adopt surface behavioral strategies can consequently experience negative emotions and an impaired sense of self-worth [
29,
30]. Lin & Huang [
31] found that surface acting was positively associated with job burnout among workers in hospital emergency departments. Relevant studies have also shown that the employee use of deep-seated behavioral strategies can result in positive emotional experiences for employees and have a positive impact on employee well-being [
31]. Tolich [
32] showed that employees feel inner satisfaction and pleasure when they are in harmonious communication with customers. Through a control group experiment, the surface-acting strategy was found to reduce the well-being of employees to some extent, while the deep-acting strategy improved their well-being [
33]. Cheung (2006) [
10] found that well-being was negatively related to surface acting in China. Earlier studies emphasized the potential negative impact of emotional labor on the well-being of service workers [
30,
34], and some recent studies argued that emotional labor can produce positive employee outcomes [
30,
35]. The most significant factor determining the effects of emotional labor was found to be the emotional labor strategy, which is the emotion regulation (i.e., surface versus deep acting) utilized by an employee to adhere to the organization’s rules for emotional displays [
28,
36]. The effortful processes of surface acting and deep acting may be related to employee stress and health as well as organizational well-being [
37]. Specifically, evidence indicates a positive association with employees’ well-being and deep acting but a negative association with surface acting [
9,
16]. In line with this perspective, Lv et al. [
4] investigated hotel employees in China and noted that, while surface acting contributed to the employees’ emotional exhaustion, deep acting reduced their sense of emotional depletion. Similar results were derived from the studies of Kim [
13] and Lam and Chen [
38] among front-line employees in the hotel industries in India, the US, and China. The following hypotheses (Hs) are thus proposed:
H1. Surface acting has a negative effect on well-being.
H2. Deep acting has a positive effect on well-being.
2.3. Emotional Disorder and its Mediating Role
Emotional disorder is a common psychological state of employees in the workplace. When employees realize that their true feelings are inconsistent with the emotions required by the established rules of the organization, emotional disorder will occur [
39]. Emotional disorder has three definitions. The first considers emotional disorder to be an antecedent of emotional labor, which is the difference between employees’ feelings and their organization’s requirements [
40,
41]. The second considers emotional disorder to be one of the components of emotional labor [
42,
43]. The third considers emotional disorder to be the outcome of emotional labor, or the inner feelings of employees if there was an inconformity between employees’ expressions and their true emotion feelings [
44]. Recent studies consider emotional disorder as an emotional state of restlessness, anxiety, and nervousness that occurs when employees’ expressions and their true emotion feelings were nonconforming, so this paper also considered emotional disorder to be the outcome of emotional labor.
Emotional disorder leads to a decline in employee satisfaction and self-worth and reduces employee well-being. Deep-seated strategies create more true or positive emotions by adjusting internal psychological emotions to lessen emotional disorder [
45]. However, surface acting consumes many resources to prevent inappropriate displays of emotion, so it creates emotional disorder [
19]. Deep-seated strategies may have a positive impact on employees’ work, allowing them to receive praise from their leaders and enhancing their self-confidence and sense of achievement [
30]. This outcome occurs because of a negative correlation between deep acting and emotional disorder such that employees seek more positive emotional experiences to reduce emotional disorder. On the other hand, surface acting consumes a great deal of psychological resources, causing employees to experience emotional exhaustion or role conflict [
13]. Based on the COR theory, employees devote their resources to work and hope to receive a positive response. Employees consume many resources in terms of emotional labor, and an imbalance will result if they do not receive a timely resource supplement, which will lead to emotional disorder. Specifically, surface acting focuses on controlling the external emotional behaviors which will damage employees’ true feelings, and it consumes many resources without replenishing them in a timely manner [
14]. Therefore, employees can easily experience emotional disorder when they use surface acting, because surface acting has a positive association with emotional disorder. However, deep acting focuses on people’s inner feelings and adjusts their emotions to the cognitive evaluation process, so it obtains a balance between inner and external emotions, which is a resource acquisition process, thus attenuating emotional disorder [
14].
In summary, emotional disorder plays an important role in the relationship between emotional labor (surface- and deep-acting strategies) and well-being, thus affecting the mental health of employees. Emotional disorder occurs when employees’ real feelings are inconsistent with the emotions dictated by organizational rules, as employees strive to show the emotions that the organization requires them to express. If they focus too much on their external display of emotions, they are likely to experience emotional disorder, resulting in psychological fatigue [
9]. In addition, if employees’ emotional experiences conflict with organizational requirements, they will try to compensate for their inappropriate emotional expressions, increasing their chances of having emotional disorder [
17]. Using the COR theory and empirical research, Grandey [
15] has proven that employees’ surface-acting strategies are positively correlated with emotional exhaustion. Deep-acting strategies focus on adjusting employees’ inner experiences, resulting in a consistency between their internal and external emotions [
9]. The use of surface-acting strategies can cause employees to be mentally tired, while the use of deep-acting strategies has a positive effect on employee enthusiasm [
21], resulting in more positive and real emotional experiences and reducing emotional disorder [
20]. Therefore, we find that the use of different emotional labor strategies has different effects on experiences of emotional disorder. When employees’ inner emotional experiences are inconsistent with the emotions they want to show, they will experience many negative thoughts and emotions that have long-term effects on their mental health. In an experimental investigation of police, Chapman [
9] found that long-term emotional disorder can lead to emotional exhaustion among police, which has a negative impact on their job satisfaction. From the perspective of the COR theory, emotional disorder consumes psychological energy. Chen [
46] found that emotional disorder in children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) has its own particular context. When these children encounter negative situations, they experience a great deal of emotional disorder. Emotional disorder has a significant negative impact on well-being. A study of Indian medical equipment salesmen also showed that emotional disorder is negatively correlated with employee well-being.
Social service workers use different strategies to express their emotional experiences in their daily work. Research shows that surface behavior has a significant positive correlation with turnover intention and job burnout. When employees adopt emotional labor strategies to show appropriate emotions, if they do not recognize their emotions, they will experience a great deal of disordered thinking, which is closely related to emotional disorder, causing emotional exhaustion, lower job satisfaction, poor well-being, and other adverse effects. If employees feel that their emotional experiences reflect their true inner feelings, they will experience less emotional stress and lower levels of emotional disorder [
47].
Based on the above analysis, this study concludes that surface acting is negatively correlated with employee well-being, while deep acting is positively correlated with employee well-being. Emotional disorder plays an intermediary role and is positively regulated by surface acting and negatively regulated by deep acting. The following was hypothesized:
H3. Surface acting has a positive effect on emotional disorder.
H4. Deep acting has a negative effect on emotional disorder.
H5. Emotional disorder has a negative effect on well-being.
This study thus proposed the development of a structural model of emotional labor strategies (i.e., surface acting versus deep acting), well-being, and emotional disorder (
Figure 1). The following is our proposed conceptual framework: