Associations of personality and emotional intelligence with display rule perceptions and emotional labour

By Elizabeth J. Austin, T. Dore, Katharine M. O’Donovan. 2008

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Emotional labour has been widely studied and is of considerable interest in relation to outcomes such as sense of accomplishment and burnout. There is a growing interest in individual differences in emotional labour and in organisational display rule perceptions. Personality and emotional intelligence (EI) are relevant to this, but their effects have been examined in a relatively small number of publications. The present study extends this literature by examining associations amongst personality, EI, display rule perceptions and emotional labour in a group of 247 undergraduate students. Surface acting (SA) was found to be positively correlated with Neuroticism and negatively correlated with Extraversion and Conscientiousness, whilst deep acting (DA) was positively correlated with Agreeableness and Extraversion. Positive display rule perceptions were correlated with Extraversion and negative display rule perceptions with Neuroticism. EI was unrelated to DA but negatively associated with SA and positively associated with positive display rule perceptions. Structural equation modelling showed that EI partially mediated the effect of personality on SA. The personality correlations were similar to previous results. For EI it appears that high-EI individuals are less likely to make use of the emotionally superficial SA strategy; this may be related to their superior emotion regulation capabilities.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8cc0dd7f534fd81d82d0863ec75ba044ea016832

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In General Health Professions

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

A Meta-Analytic Structural Model of Dispositonal Affectivity and Emotional Labor (2013, background): “Research suggests that individuals who are high in dispositional negative affect also have greater difficulty with emotion regulation (Austin et al., 2008; Ng & Diener, 2009).”
The big five, emotional exhaustion and citizenship behaviors in service settings: The mediating role of emotional labor (2011, background): “Prior studies by Diefendorff et al. (2005) and Austin et al. (2008) found no relationship between openness to experience and emotion regulation.”
Reducing burnout and enhancing job satisfaction: Critical role of hotel employees’ emotional intelligence and emotional labor (2012, unknown): “Little empirical research has been devoted to an integrated view, examining antecedents of emotional labor that may further influence the outcomes of emotional labor (Allen et al., 2010; Austin et al., 2008; Giardini and Frese, 2006).”
Counterproductive work behavior among frontline government employees: Role of personality, emotional intelligence, affectivity, emotional labor, and emotional exhaustion (2016, background): “For example, Austin, Dore, and O’Donovan (2008) and Mikolajczak et al. (2007) have shown that the relationship between EI and emotional labor (surface acting dimension) is negative; Brotheridge (2006) has shown that there is no relationship between these two constructs; Wong and Law (2002) have…”
Affectivity, Emotional Labor, Emotional Exhaustion, and Emotional Intelligence in Coaching (2016, background): “Emotional intelligence has been found to have particular relevance in the study of emotional labor in psychology (Austin et al., 2008) and job burnout in teaching context (Chan, 2006).”