Employees' surface acting in interactions with leaders and peers

• Date: 01 November 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2015
• Author: Xiaoxiao Hu,Junqi Shi
• Published date: 01 November 2015

Employees’surface acting in interactions with

leaders and peers

XIAOXIAO HU

1

*AND JUNQI SHI

2

*

1

Department of Psychology, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.A.

2

Lingnan College, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

Summary Surface acting has been widely studied in organizational research owing to its impact on organizational

behaviors and outcomes. Past research almost exclusively has focused on employees’interactions with exter-

nal parties such as customers, clients, and patients. This study sought to extend this literature by examining

the effects of employees’surface acting in interactions with parties internal to the organization (i.e., leaders

and peers). Data were collected from 40 work groups (129 focal participants, 40 leaders, and 40 peers) from

a large real estate agency company located in Beijing, China. Results showed that employees’surface acting

influenced various emotional, relational, and behavioral outcomes. In addition, the present findings revealed

that the consequences of employees’surface acting differed across leaders versus peers. Copyright © 2015

John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: surface acting; faking positive emotions; suppressing negative emotions

The workplace is saturated with emotions. Regulation of emotional displays, commonly referred to as surface acting

(Hochschild, 1983), constitutes an important part of organizational life (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995). Such regu-

lation has important implications for employees’functioning and well-being. For instance, surface acting has been

associated with various negative outcomes such as psychological strain (Hulsheger & Schewe, 2011), emotional

exhaustion (Hulsheger & Schewe, 2011), physical illnesses (Schanbroeck & Jones, 2000), poor job performance

(Grandey, 2003), and antisocial behaviors (Brill, 2000).

During the past two decades, dramatic progress has been made in understanding the role and importance of man-

aging emotional displays in organizational behaviors and outcomes (Kanfer & Kantrowitz, 2002). This research

mainly has centered around the construct of emotional labor, which is conceptualized as the act of displaying orga-

nizationally desired emotions during interpersonal interactions (Morris & Feldman, 1996). Emotional labor research

almost exclusively has focused on employees’interactions with external parties such as customers, clients, and

patients (Grandey, 2003; Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011). This focus is certainly understandable given that managing

emotional expressions in these interactions is often required by the job as a means to promote organiza tional goals

(e.g., Ashkanasy & Daus, 2002; Grandey, 2000).

However, employees do not only engage in surface acting when interacting with external parties. For most em-

ployees outside the service industry, the type of interactions in which they most commonly engage is with internal

members of the organization, such as their leaders and peers (Grandey, Kern, & Frone, 2007). During these interac-

tions, management of emotional expressions is common, although such regulation is not required by the job. Sup-

pressing or faking emotional displays has been found to occur in almost two-thirds of workplace communications,

both at and away from the frontline (Mann, 1999), suggesting that there is just as much surface acting betw een in-

ternal members of the organization as between internal and external parties (Glasø & Einarsen, 2008).

*Correspondence to: Xiaoxiao Hu, Department of Psychology, Old Dominion University, 5115 Hampton Boulevard, Norfolk, Virginia 23529,

U.S.A. E-mail: xiaoxiaohu.pku@gmail.com

Junqi Shi, Department of Management, Lingnan (University) College, SunYat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China. E-mail: shijq3@mail.

sysu.edu.cn

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 23 December 2012

Revised 10 December 2014, Accepted 4 April 2015

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 36, 1132–1152 (2015)

Published online 24 June 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2015

Research Article

Although employees frequently engage in surface acting during interactions within the organization, this phenom-

enon has received little attention in organizational research (Ozcelik, 2012). This neglect is potentially problematic

as surface acting within organizations may be largely discrepant from surface acting with external parties. A major

difference between the two lies in the nature of the relationships. Although employee–outsider interactions can occur

regularly in certain circumstances (e.g., doctors interacting with patients), the interactions between employees and

customers are typically one-time incidents (Gutek, Bhappu, Liao-Troth, & Cherry, 1999). In contrast, interactions

between internal members generally occur on a daily, ongoing basis (Grandey et al., 2007). As such interactions

are repeated, behaviors in, and responses to, earlier interactions may influence later interactions between the two

parties (e.g., surface acting in previous interactions may impact employees’tendency to engage in future interactions

with a particular organizational member). This type of influence does not exist in one-time employee–outsider inter-

actions and has not been addressed in traditional research on surface acting.

Moreover, given the difference in the nature of the relationships, interaction partners in these two situations may

have different expectations for employees’behaviors, resulting in discrepant reactions to employees’surface acting.

During employee–outsider interactions, employees’surface acting (e.g., faking positive emotions or “service with a

smile”) is likely to be expected and appreciated by their interaction partners who are often customers or clients of the

organization. In contrast, employees’surface acting within organizations may not be well accepted by interaction part-

ners because surface acting may be considered as undesirable given the inauthenticity it involves. This difference sug-

gests that surface acting in these two situations is likely to influence interaction partners’reactions in discrepant ways.

In addition to the types of relationships, differences in the levels of the relationships between these two situations

may also influence the effects of surface acting on interactions partners. Norms for acquaintances (e.g., coworkers

and leaders) may specify behaviors dissimilar to those expected in interacting with strangers (e.g., customers;

Tschan, Rochat, & Zapf, 2005). The former often involves an expectation of honesty, which requires real emotions

to be expressed (Argyle & Henderson, 1985). As a consequence, surface acting may result in stronger adverse reac-

tions from acquaintances as compared with strangers.

Another difference between the two situations lies in the frequency of surface acting. In traditional emotional

labor research, the negative impact of surface acting on employees’well-being is conceived as a result of chronic

strain brought by high frequency of emotional labor requirements (Tschan et al., 2005). Interactions within organi-

zations may not take place as frequently as service employees’interactions with customers, and this reduced fre-

quency might weaken the relationship between surface acting and employees’well-being.

Given these and likely other differences, traditional research on the effects of surface acting is unlikely to be

adequate for understanding the impact of employees’surface acting in interactions with internal members of orga-

nizations. Based on the earlier discussions, surface acting in internal interactions may influence future interactions

between the two parties, and such impact could not be examined in one-time employee–outsider interactions. In

addition, surface acting in these two situations may have different effects on interaction partners’reactions and

employees’well-being, owing to differences in the nature and levels of social relationships as well as the frequency

of surface acting.

To our knowledge, only two studies have examined the effects of internal surface acting in organizations. Glasø

and Einarsen (2008) showed that employees’surface acting in interactions with leaders was negatively related with

employees’overall job satisfaction and positively related with subjective health complaints. Recently, Ozcelik

(2012) found that surface acting in interactions with coworkers was positively associated with emotional exhaustion

and negatively associated with role performance in work group. Although these two studies represented important

contributions to the understanding of the effects of internal surface acting in organizations, these investigations were

limited to the influence of surface acting on employees themselves and were largely focused on traditional outcomes

of surface acting without examining relationship-related outcomes between the two parties (e.g., how surface acting

would influence interaction partners’reactions and later interactions between the two parties). In addition, these two

studies only examined one type of interaction partner (i.e., leader or coworker) within the organization. Given that

employees’surface acting tends to vary across different interaction targets (Diefendorff & Greguras, 2009), includ-

ing and comparing different types of interaction partners in the study would be especially valuable and informative.

EMPLOYEES’SURFACE ACTING 1133

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 36, 1132–1152 (2015)

DOI: 10.1002/job