Emotion Work and its Mediating Role on Employees Health
In recent years, the major focus of health psychologists is to understand the role of individual differences in the performance of emotion work and its health outcome. Individual difference in temperament and emotional intelligence appear to play an important role in predicting emotion work, which largely influences the physical and psychological health of customer service workers. The literature indicates that workers who experience frequent negative emotions and emotional dissonance may suffer from physical health problems which in turn, impair their cognitive health leading to a sense of stagnation towards work life. By using cross sectional descriptive survey on 400 customer service workers across the country, the study examines the mediating role of emotion work between (a) emotionality and emotional exhaustion, and (b) emotional intelligence and psychological wellbeing. The subjects were assessed on temperament, emotional intelligence, emotion work, psychological wellbeing and on emotional exhaustion. Correlational analysis showed that negative emotions and emotional dissonance were significantly positively related with both emotional exhaustion and emotionality followed by its negative association with psychological wellbeing and emotional intelligence. Mediation analysis revealed that emotional dissonance mediates the relationship between emotionality and emotional exhaustion. Also, negative emotions mediated the relationship between emotional intelligence and psychological wellbeing. The study highlights the need for assessing the emotionality of individual, as a potential source to guide and refine employee selection along with development of methods and techniques to buffer the negative effects of emotion work.
