The effects of emotional labor and moderating roles of gender, age, and manager emotional intelligence on the job and organizational outcomes: a case study of frontline hotel employees in Phuket, Thailand

Abstract

In the high competition of the hospitality and service industry, hotels are in the process of intensely managing their employees’behavior and emotions, and this can have a detrimental impact on frontline employees’ work attitudes, job performance, and behavior within the organization. In Thailand, there are still pressing questions regarding these issues. The objectives of this study were to examine the relationships among emotional labor, burnout, job satisfaction, turnover intention, and organizational commitment, and to compare the moderating roles of the employee’s gender, age, and manager emotional intelligence affecting emotional labor concerning the job satisfaction and burnout of hotel frontline employees in Thailand. A total of 509 subjects were investigated. With the structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple group analysis technique used in this study, the positive and negative significant effects of emotional labor concerning job and organizational outcomes, and the moderating roles of age and manager emotional intelligence, were determined. The managerial implications from the results of the study can have beneficial outcomes for the hospitality and service industry, particularly regarding the human resource management process in terms of dealing and custom treat with employees’ emotional labor.

Keywords: burnout, emotional labor, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intention