Employees in a hotel, a representative service industry, make contact with new customers and receive requests from customers. In the process, they are forced to be polite, and always well represent the organization even though situations are unpleasan...
Employees in a hotel, a representative service industry, make contact with new customers and receive requests from customers. In the process, they are forced to be polite, and always well represent the organization even though situations are unpleasant regardless of their own intention. It means they carry out emotional labor. Accordingly, there is the imminent matter of handling such stress and having human resource management treat emotion as an essential matter. In relation to this, there are prolific studies on emotional labor in the hotel industry.
However, the existing studies were mainly focused on employees. This study carried out research on the emotional labor of employees from the perspective of customers. It is important to make a sound interrelation between customers and employees to make a friendly emotional reaction and to show the emotion of employees to customers in the process of service provision in order to make a sound interrelation. Thus, this study aimed to figure out the effects of the emotional labor of employees upon relationship affection to understand the control effect of authenticity between emotional labor and relationship affection.
The below results were drawn through an empirical analysis.
First, as a result of analysis on the effect of employee’s emotional labor on relationship affection of customers, for approaching relationship affection, surface acting had negative(-) relation to approaching relationship affection, and deep acting had positive(+) effect on approaching relationship affection. For separated relationship affection, surface acting had positive(+) relation to separated relationship affection, and deep acting had negative (-) effect on separated relationship affection. Accordingly, it is recommended for a hotel to teach the idea that every emotional labor results in positive customer behavior, and if the hotel wishes to achieve corporate objectives through emotional labor, it needs in-depth understanding of emotional labor, especially of the acting methods of emotional behavior. In addition, it is recommended to have employees trained and educated so that they might act authentically, for example deep acting.
Second, as a result of analysis on the customer’s emotions upon behavioral intention, approaching relationship affection had positive(+) effect on behavioral intention, and separated relationship emotion had negative(-) effect on behavioral intention. Thus, the hotel needs to take a relationship marketing strategy that emphasizes comfort, recognition, gratitude, good feelings, humanity and familiarity.
Third, as a result of the analysis on the control effect of authenticity in the relation between emotional labor and relationship affection, it showed that emotional labor had no statistically significant relation with the approaching relationship effect, and showed to be an independent variable that effected relationship affection directly which is a subordinate variable. In particular, when the effect of authenticity on the relationship affection regarding authenticity as an independent variable, authenticity had a positive(+) effect on approaching relationship affection. Likewise, it showed that there was no significant control effect of authenticity in the relation with separated relationship affection, and proved to be an independent variable that effected relationship affection directly.
In particular, authenticity had a negative(-) effect on separated relationship emotion. Accordingly, the hotel needs to develop an emphasis on authentic service rather than differentiated or unique service. And it is also recommended to provide authentic service at the service contact point rather than excellent service solely in appearance. It also needs to provide warm service rather than cold rational service. In order to provide such authentic service, it is important to have proper education and training for employees. The training needs to stress authenticity rather than stressful smiles, gestures or greetings.
Thus, it is necessary to carry out training through which employees may experience positive feeling, or employees may transfer negative experience feelings to positive feelings. And in recruiting employees for such authentic service, it is necessary to select employees with personal characteristics for emotional labor. For this purpose, the company needs to set up a selecting criteria based on compassion and expression ability. It also needs to have a sincere interview process and testing, considering the significance of customer contact with employees no matter how expensive the cost and endeavor required.