Antecedents and outcomes of emotional labor: a study of front-line employees of the tourism industry in Vietnam

Abstract

The new trend of successful tourism companies is truly engaging their front-line service employees by applying emotional labor theory to maximize service quality, satisfaction, and behavioral outcomes. This study investigates the antecedents of front-line service employee emotional labor in the tourism organizations in Vietnam. It also examines the role of emotional labor toward employee job burnout and job satisfaction. Employing the CFA & SEM analyses with a sample of 302 front-line employees, the research findings reveal that emotional intelligence, job autonomy, and emotional display rules has the positive relationships with emotional labor and emotional labor has a positive relationship with job burnout. Furthermore, emotional labor negatively relates to job satisfaction of Vietnamese employees. Finally, job burnout has a negative relationship with job satisfaction.