Motivational Bases and Emotional Labor: Assessing the Impact of Public Service Motivation

• Date: 01 March 2012
• Author: Kai‐Jo Fu,Kaifeng Yang,Chih‐Wei Hsieh
• Published date: 01 March 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2011.02499.x

Assessing the Impact of Public Service Motivation 241

Kai-Jo Fu is a doctoral candidate in the

Askew School of Public Administration

and Policy, Florida State University. Her

research interests include human resource

management, leadership, and organiza-

tional theory.

E-mail: kf07d@fsu.edu

Kaifeng Yang is associate professor and

PhD program director in the Askew School

of Public Administration and Policy, Florida

State University. He has published widely on

citizen participation, public management,

and performance measurement. He is

managing editor of

Public Performance and

Management Review.

E-mail: kyang@fsu.edu

Chih-Wei Hsieh is assistant professor

in the School of Public Administration,

University of New Mexico. His research

interests include human resource

management, organizational theory, and

emotional labor.

E-mail: chsieh@unm.edu

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 72, Iss. 2, pp. 241–251. © 2011 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.111/j.1540-6210.2011.02499.x.

Chih-Wei Hsieh

University of New Mexico

Kaifeng Yang

Kai-Jo Fu

Florida State University

Emotional labor has become an important topic in the

study of organizational behavior, but no research has

examined how it is af‌f ected in individuals’ motivational

bases. Public administration scholars have started to

study this concept, but empirical studies are still in their

infancy. Focusing on a particular type of motivational

base—public service motivation (PSM), this article

assesses how PSM and its three dimensions (attraction

to policy making, commitment to public interest, and

compassion) af‌f ect two common emotional labor activities

(surface acting and deep acting). Using data from a

survey of certif‌i ed public management students, the results

show that PSM is negatively associated with surface acting

and positively associated with deep acting. Among the

PSM dimensions, attraction to policy making is positively

associated with surface acting; compassion is negatively

associated with surface acting and positively associated

with deep acting; and commitment to public interest is

not associated with surface acting or deep acting.

Although emotions have been an implicit feature

of the organizational sciences since Elton

Mayo and the human relations movement,

their critical role was not examined suf‌f‌i ciently for an

extended period of time when the pursuit of ef‌f‌i ciency,

predictability, calculability, and impersonality domi-

nated organizational life. Since the 1980s, many

organizational scientists have turned toward a more

humanist view and called for more attention to the

role of emotions (Fineman 1999; Hochschild 1983;

Keltner and Haidt 2001). A prominent stream of such

research focuses on emotional labor—employee ef‌f orts

to actively display socially and organizationally desired

emotions as they engage in job-related interactions

(Ashforth and Humphrey 1993; Hochschild 1983;

Morris and Feldman 1997). It

has become an important topic

in f‌i elds such as sociology, man-

agement, occupational psychol-

ogy, education, and criminology.

Public administration scholars

have started to acknowledge the

importance of emotional labor (Guy and Newman

2004; Hsieh and Guy 2009; Mastracci, Newman,

and Guy 2006; Meier, Mastracci, and Wilson 2006;

Newman, Guy, and Mastracci 2009). Like physical or

cognitive labor, emotional labor is an essential com-

ponent of service delivery regardless of whether it is in

the public, nonprof‌i t, or private sector. When public

service delivery requires face-to-face or voice-to-voice

exchanges between workers and citizens, successful

performance of this work relies on how workers detect

the af‌f ective state of the citizens, adjust their own

af‌f ective state, and exhibit work-appropriate emotive

behaviors (i.e., nicer than nice or tougher than tough;

see Newman, Guy, and Mastracci 2009). Guy, New-

man, and Mastracci note that “to ignore the emotion

work that is required in public service is to luxuriate

in the myth that mission accomplishment is merely

a matter of correctly allocating resources . . . if the

service in public service means anything, it is that the

relational component of public service jobs must be

acknowledged” (2008, 69).

Emotional labor research is rapidly growing inside

and outside the f‌i eld of public administration. Along

with lingering debates about its conceptualization and

dimensionality, its nomological network—including

its related constructs such as antecedents, correlates,

and consequences—has not been mapped fully. A few

studies have examined its potential antecedents, such

as personality, emotional display rules, and interaction

characteristics (Brotheridge and Grandey 2002; Broth-

eridge and Lee 2003; Diefendorf‌f , Croyle, and Gos-

serand 2005), but their f‌i ndings need validation, and

many other potential antecedents have not been in-

vestigated. One such potential antecedent is employ-

ees’ motivational bases—what

motivates employees to behave

in a certain way. It is reason-

able to expect that people with

dif‌f erent motivational bases may

have dif‌f erent tendencies or use

dif‌f erent strategies to regulate

their emotions. Studying the

Motivational Bases and Emotional Labor: Assessing

the Impact of Public Service Motivation

Studying the ef‌f ects of

motivational bases helps us

understand how to motivate or

induce employees to engage in

emotional labor.