Customer responses to emotional labour in discrete and relational service exchange

As part of their jobs, many service employees are required to express certain emotions, such as positive affect toward service customers. Sometimes employees do not actually feel the emotions that they are expressing, resulting in what has been called “emotional labour.” Although a number of scholars have examined how service employees respond to requirements for emotional labour, few have studied how customers respond to employees who are enacting emotional labour ‐ or its opposite, emotional effortlessness. Building from the impression management framework, this paper develops an operationalization of emotional labour and presents hypotheses about consumer responses to emotional labour and emotional effortlessness. It also proposes an adaptation of previous marketing applications of the impression management framework. The hypotheses are then tested in two laboratory experiments. Results suggest that perceptions of emotional effortlessness can have a significant and positive impact on customer evaluations, but only in relational (as opposed to discrete) service situations.