호텔 직원의 감정노동, 심리적 임파워먼트, 소진 및 친사회적 서비스 행동 간의 관계

Abstract

Hotel employees must meet the demands of both customers and the organization. In other words, hotel employees need to provide the service with more active attitudes and present prosocial service behavior to offer more service to customers than it is officially required. However, in their hard effort to provide the service for customers, they are frequently exposed to emotional labor. This is because, despite their emotional fluctuation, they have to restrain and control their emotional expressions to convey only positive emotions at all times. In this regard, emotional labor can be viewed as a downside of pro-social service behavior. In addition, in examining the influence relationship of emotional labor experienced by hotel employees on their prosocial service behavior, multidimensional approaches are required for empirical analysis by taking into account variables with positive influence, such as psychological empowerment, as well as negatively-affecting variables, such as burnout. As a result of such an analysis, efforts should be made by hotel corporations to establish continuous and practical plans to improve their prosocial service behavior. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the influence relationship of emotional labor to which hotel employees are exposed in their work on their prosocial service behavior when this relationship is mediated by burnout and psychological empowerment. In particular, the analysis has been performed with its central focus on the mediation effect of burnout and the control effect of psychological empowerment. Also, it was presumed that there would be difference in emotional labor, burnout, psychological empowerment, and prosocial service behavior between groups divided by demographic characteristics, job types, and intensities of emotional labor. Namely, the study aims to offer theoretical and practical implications by examining the relations between emotional labor, burnout, psychological empowerment, and prosocial service behavior. First: Emotional labor influences burnout. Second: Emotional labor affects prosocial service behavior. Third: Burnout influences prosocial service behavior. Forth: In the relationship between emotional labor and prosocial service behavior, burnout has the mediation effect. Fifth. In the relationship between emotional labor and prosocial service behavior, psychological empowerment exhibits the control effect.

The analysis was conducted on employees who provide service for customers in six first-class hotels equipped with more than 250 rooms in Jeju Special Self-Governing Province. After two preliminary surveys, the samples were collected by handing out 420 questionnaires in total, of which 398 questionnaires were returned and 386 of them were utilized for the research with 12 insufficiently-answered questionnaires discarded. The analysis result suggests significant influence relationships between emotional labor, burnout, psychological empowerment, and prosocial service behavior. Particularly, it is confirmed that, on the relationship between emotional labor and prosocial service behavior, burnout and psychological empowerment have the mediation effect and the control effect, respectively. Resting upon the analysis result, this study draws the following implications. First, this study tested the hypotheses by focusing solely on the negative aspects of emotional labor―for instance, emotional labor may cause psychological and physical stress to employees and disturb their work engagement, which can lead to deteriorating the quality of the service and the organizational performance. The study highlights the fact that emotional labor may bring about negative effects on employees. Therefore, the result of this study is expected to provide important bases for future studies developing solutions for emotional labor. Second, this study performed a difference analysis on groups divided by intensity levels of emotional labor, defined by Korea Employment Information Service, and demographic characteristics. The result of this analysis should offer valuable evidence for future research on emotional labor, psychological empowerment, and prosocial service behavior in hotel corporations. Third, hotel companies have recently been in unlimited competition. Due to such a paradigm shift, hotel companies are attempting numerous approaches to improve their employees' service quality and performance. In this regard, a further implication can be found in the fact that the study tested the structural model that considers the control effect of psychological empowerment and the mediation effect of burnout in the relationship between emotional labor and prosocial service behavior. Fourth, emotional labor was shown to have a significant influence on prosocial service behavior. In addition to this, it was presented that burnout has the mediation effect in the process of emotional labor affecting prosocial service behavior. This demonstrates the necessity to provide training and education for employees to narrow the difference between their actual emotional expressions and emotional expressions required by their hotel company in an endeavor to enhance prosocial service behavior. Furthermore, it is implied that such programs must include training for employees to reduce their degree of burnout. Fifth, it was suggested that psychological empowerment has the control effect on the relationship between emotional labor and prosocial service behavior. This implies that, in order for employees to present prosocial service behavior required by hotel companies in the situation where employees are experiencing negative emotional labor, psychological empowerment has to be reinforced. While R hotel, which was shown to have the highest intensity of emotional labor in the supplemental analysis, had the lowest level of psychological empowerment, L hotel, which presented the lowest intensity of emotional labor, displayed the highest level of psychological empowerment in a relative sense as well as the higher level of prosocial service behavior. Hence, hotel companies need to provide continuous education and repetitive training for psychological empowerment to be boosted and develop a system to routinize such efforts.