Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Workplace mistreatment and emotional labor: A latent profile analysis

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Motivation and Emotion Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

By adopting a person-centered approach, this research explored emotional labor latent profiles based on employees’ levels of surface acting and deep acting. Further, this study examined the role of workplace mistreatment from different sources (customer incivility, coworker incivility, abusive supervision, and organizational dehumanization) in the prediction of profile membership and the associations between these profiles and several outcomes (job satisfaction, turnover intentions, emotional exhaustion, and affective commitment). Five profiles of emotional laborers were identified (surface actors, regulators, low actors, non-actors, and deep actors). Customer incivility, coworker incivility, and organizational dehumanization but not abusive supervision were found to be associated with profile membership. Particularly, employees who perceived high levels of organizational dehumanization had a higher likelihood to be identified as surface actors. Overall, positive outcomes were associated with deep actors, while surface actors were more likely to be related to negative outcomes. Our findings provide further support for the advantages of adopting a person-centered perspective to the study of emotional labor.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. All the details related to the four- and six-profile solutions are available at the following web address: https://osf.io/p8nyk/?view_only=5240971a27284e35aa462ba2850a8ffa.

References

  • Adams, G. A., & Webster, J. R. (2013). Emotional regulation as a mediator between interpersonal mistreatment and distress. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology,22, 697–710.

    Google Scholar 

  • Andersson, L. M., & Pearson, C. M. (1999). Tit for tat? The spiraling effect of incivility in the workplace. Academy of Management Review,24, 452–471.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asparouhov, T., & Muthén, B. (2014). Auxiliary variables in mixture modeling: Three-step approaches using Mplus. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal,21, 329–341.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bastian, B., & Haslam, N. (2011). Experiencing dehumanization: Cognitive and emotional effects of everyday dehumanization. Basic and Applied Social Psychology,33, 295–303.

    Google Scholar 

  • Becker, T. E. (2005). Potential problems in the statistical control of variables in organizational research: A qualitative analysis with recommendations. Organizational Research Methods,8, 274–289.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bell, C. M., & Khoury, C. (2011). Organizational de/humanization, deindividuation, anomie, and in/justice. In S. Gilliland, D. Steiner, & D. Skarlicki (Eds.), Emerging perspectives on organizational justice and ethics (pp. 167–197). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brotheridge, C. M., & Lee, R. T. (2002). Testing a conservation of resources model of the dynamics of emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,7, 57–67.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Brotheridge, C. M., & Lee, R. T. (2003). Development and validation of the emotional labour scale. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology,76, 365–379.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burnfield, J. L., Clark, O. L., Devendorf, S. A., & Jex, S. M. (2004, April). Understanding workplace incivility: Scale development and validation. Paper presented at the 19th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Chicago.

  • Caesens, G., Nguyen, N., & Stinglhamber, F. (2018). Abusive supervision and organizational dehumanization. Journal of Business and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-018-9592-3.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Caesens, G., Stinglhamber, F., Demoulin, S., & De Wilde, M. (2017). Perceived organizational support and employees’ well-being: The mediating role of organizational dehumanization. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology,26, 527–540.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carlson, D., Ferguson, M., Hunter, E., & Whitten, D. (2012). Abusive supervision and work–family conflict: The path through emotional labor and burnout. The Leadership Quarterly,23, 849–859.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cheung, F., & Lun, V. M. C. (2015). Emotional labor and occupational well-being. Journal of Individual Differences,36, 30–37.

    Google Scholar 

  • Conway, J. M., & Lance, C. E. (2010). What reviewers should expect from authors regarding common method bias in organizational research. Journal of Business and Psychology,25, 325–334.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cortina, L. M., Magley, V. J., Williams, J. H., & Langhout, R. D. (2001). Incivility in the workplace: Incidence and impact. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,6, 64–80.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Eisenberger, R., Cummings, J., Armeli, S., & Lynch, P. (1997). Perceived organizational support, discretionary treatment, and job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Psychology,82, 812–820.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Eisenberger, R., & Stinglhamber, F. (2011). Perceived organizational support: Fostering enthusiastic and productive employees. Washington, DC: APA Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Estabrook, R., & Neale, M. (2013). A comparison of factor score estimation methods in the presence of missing data: Reliability and an application to nicotine dependence. Multivariate Behavioral Research,48, 1–27.

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Fouquereau, E., Morin, A. J., Lapointe, E., Mokounkolo, R., & Gillet, N. (2018). Emotional labour profiles: Associations with key predictors and outcomes. Work & Stress. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2018.1502835.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gabriel, A. S., Daniels, M. A., Diefendorff, J. M., & Greguras, G. J. (2015). Emotional labor actors: A latent profile analysis of emotional labor strategies. Journal of Applied Psychology,100, 863–879.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Gabriel, A. S., & Diefendorff, J. M. (2015). Emotional labor dynamics: A momentary approach. Academy of Management Journal,58, 1804–1825.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grandey, A. A. (2000). Emotional regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,5, 95–110.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Grandey, A. A. (2003). When “the show must go on”: Surface acting and deep acting as determinants of emotional exhaustion and peer-rated service delivery. Academy of Management Journal,46, 86–96.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grandey, A. A., Dickter, D. N., & Sin, H. P. (2004). The customer is not always right: Customer aggression and emotion regulation of service employees. Journal of Organizational Behavior,25, 397–418.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grandey, A. A., Foo, S. C., Groth, M., & Goodwin, R. E. (2012). Free to be you and me: A climate of authenticity alleviates burnout from emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,17, 1–14.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Grandey, A. A., Kern, J. H., & Frone, M. R. (2007). Verbal abuse from outsiders versus insiders: Comparing frequency, impact on emotional exhaustion, and the role of emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,12, 63–79.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Grandey, A. A., & Melloy, R. C. (2017). The state of the heart: Emotional labor as emotion regulation reviewed and revised. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,22, 407–422.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: An integrative review. Personality and Social Psychology Review,10, 252–264.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Hobfoll, S. E. (2001). The influence of culture, community, and the nested-self in the stress process: Advancing conservation of resources theory. Applied Psychology,50, 337–421.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Holman, D., Martinez-Iñigo, D., & Totterdell, P. (2008). Emotional labour and employee well-being: An integrative review. In N. Ashkanasy & C. Cooper (Eds.), Research companion to emotion in organizations (pp. 301–315). Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hülsheger, U. R., & Schewe, A. F. (2011). On the costs and benefits of emotional labor: A meta-analysis of three decades of research. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,16, 361–389.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Humphrey, R. H., Ashforth, B. E., & Diefendorff, J. M. (2015). The bright side of emotional labor. Journal of Organizational Behavior,36, 749–769.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jaros, S. J. (1997). An assessment of Meyer and Allen’s (1991) three-component model of organizational commitment and turnover intentions. Journal of Vocational Behavior,51, 319–337.

    Google Scholar 

  • Judge, T. A., Woolf, E. F., & Hurst, C. (2009). Is emotional labor more difficult for some than for others? A multilevel, experience-sampling study. Personnel Psychology,62, 57–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kruml, S. M., & Geddes, D. (2000). Exploring the dimensions of emotional labor: The heart of Hochschild’s work. Management Communication Quarterly,14, 8–49.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lavelle, J. J., Rupp, D. E., & Brockner, J. (2007). Taking a multifoci approach to the study of justice, social exchange, and citizenship behavior: The target similarity model. Journal of Management,33, 841–866.

    Google Scholar 

  • LeBel, E. P., McCarthy, R. J., Earp, B. D., Elson, M., & Vanpaemel, W. (2018). A unified framework to quantify the credibility of scientific findings. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science,1, 389–402.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leiter, M. P., Laschinger, H. K. S., Day, A., & Oore, D. G. (2011). The impact of civility interventions on employee social behavior, distress, and attitudes. Journal of Applied Psychology,96, 1258–1274.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Liu, Y., Prati, L. M., Perrewé, P. L., & Brymer, R. A. (2010). Individual differences in emotion regulation, emotional experiences at work, and work-related outcomes: A two-study investigation. Journal of Applied Social Psychology,40, 1515–1538.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marsh, H. W., Hau, K. T., & Wen, Z. (2004). In search of golden rules: Comment on hypothesis-testing approaches to setting cutoff values for fit indexes and dangers in overgeneralizing Hu and Bentler’s (1999) findings. Structural Equation Modeling,11, 320–341.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1986). Maslach burnout inventory manual (2nd ed.). Palo Alto: CA Consulting Psychologists Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mesmer-Magnus, J. R., DeChurch, L. A., & Wax, A. (2012). Moving emotional labor beyond surface and deep acting: A discordance-congruence perspective. Organizational Psychology Review,2, 6–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyer, J. P., Allen, N. J., & Smith, C. A. (1993). Commitment to organizations and occupations: Extension and test of a three-component conceptualization. Journal of Applied Psychology,78, 538–551.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyer, J. P., & Morin, A. J. (2016). A person-centered approach to commitment research: Theory, research, and methodology. Journal of Organizational Behavior,37, 584–612.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morin, A. J. (2016). Person-centered research strategies in commitment research. In J. P. Meyer (Ed.), The handbook of employee commitment (pp. 490–508). Cheltenham, United Kingdom: Edward Elgar.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morin, A. J., Maiano, C., Nagengast, B., Marsh, H. W., Morizot, J., & Janosz, M. (2011). General growth mixture analysis of adolescents’ developmental trajectories of anxiety: The impact of untested invariance assumptions on substantive interpretations. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal,18, 613–648.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morin, A. J., Meyer, J. P., Creusier, J., & Biétry, F. (2016). Multiple-group analysis of similarity in latent profile solutions. Organizational Research Methods,19, 231–254.

    Google Scholar 

  • Muthén, B.O, & Muthén, L. K. (1998–2017). Mplus user’s guide (8 edn.). Los Angeles, CA: Muthén & Muthén.

  • Nguyen, N., & Stinglhamber, F. (2018). Emotional labor and core self-evaluations as mediators between organizational dehumanization and job satisfaction. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9988-2.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ozcelik, H. (2013). An empirical analysis of surface acting in intra-organizational relationships. Journal of Organizational Behavior,34, 291–309.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peer, E., Brandimarte, L., Samat, S., & Acquisti, A. (2017). Beyond the Turk: Alternative platforms for crowdsourcing behavioral research. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,70, 153–163.

    Google Scholar 

  • Petras, H., & Masyn, K. (2010). General growth mixture analysis with antecedents and consequences of change. In A. R. Piquero & D. Weisburd (Eds.), Handbook of quantitative criminology (pp. 69–100). New York, NY: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Philipp, A., & Schüpbach, H. (2010). Longitudinal effects of emotional labour on emotional exhaustion and dedication of teachers. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,15, 494–504.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Lee, J., & Podsakoff, N. (2003). Common method biases in behavioral research: A critical review of the literature and recommended remedies. Journal of Applied Psychology,88, 879–903.

    Google Scholar 

  • Satorra, A., & Bentler, P. M. (2001). A scaled difference Chi square test statistic for moment structure analysis. Psychometrika,66, 507–514.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sliter, M., Jex, S., Wolford, K., & McInnerney, J. (2010). How rude! Emotional labor as a mediator between customer incivility and employee outcomes. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,15, 468–481.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Sliter, M., Sliter, K., & Jex, S. (2012). The employee as a punching bag: The effect of multiple sources of incivility employee withdrawal behavior and sales performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior,33, 121–139.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tepper, B. J. (2000). Consequences of abusive supervision. Academy of Management Journal,43, 178–190.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vermunt, J. K. (2010). Latent class modeling with covariates: Two improved three-step approaches. Political Analysis,18, 450–469.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,54, 1063–1070.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Zou, W. C., & Dahling, J. (2017). Workplace spirituality buffers the effects of emotional labour on employee well-being. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology,26, 768–777.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the “Fonds Spéciaux de la Recherche” of the Université catholique de Louvain and by ARC under Grant No. 16/20-071 of the French Community of Belgium.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université Catholique de Louvain, Place Cardinal Mercier, 10, L3.05.01, 1348, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium

    Nathan Nguyen & Florence Stinglhamber

Authors
  1. Nathan Nguyen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Florence Stinglhamber
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nathan Nguyen.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Nguyen, N., Stinglhamber, F. Workplace mistreatment and emotional labor: A latent profile analysis. Motiv Emot 44, 474–490 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-019-09803-8

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-019-09803-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation