Social welfare service, one of the characteristics of which is high frequency of contacts with other people, has no tangible form, which means that its quality depends on its provider. Social welfare facilities thus place such importance on human serv ...
Social welfare service, one of the characteristics of which is high frequency of contacts with other people, has no tangible form, which means that its quality depends on its provider. Social welfare facilities thus place such importance on human service, and their employees considerably resort to their emotions unlike their counterparts in other lines of business. This study thus set up an integrated model with the affectivity and emotional intelligence of social welfare facility employees as independent variables, their emotional labor strategies as a mediating variables, and their emotional dissonance, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction as dependent variables. The study also examined the differential influences of their emotional labor strategies (surface acting and deep acting) with a focus on the facial feedback hypothesis and alienation hypothesis. The investigator sent out a total of 2,000 questionnaires to the employees of social welfare facilities in Busan and Gyeongnam Province via mail and used a total of 1,398 questionnaires whose answers were sincere enough in the final analysis. The analysis results show that affectivity and emotional intelligence had differential influences on emotional labor strategies. Second, emotional labor strategies had differential impacts on emotional dissonance, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction. Finally, affectivity and emotional intelligence had differential effects on emotional dissonance, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction. The analysis results of mediating effects reveal in particular that positive affectivity and regulation of emotions in oneself had indirect impacts on emotional dissonance, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction through deep acting, and that negative affectivity and appraisal and expression of emotions in oneself had indirect impacts on emotional dissonance, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction through surface acting. In addition, appraisal and recognition of emotions in others turned out to have indirect effects on job satisfaction through surface and deep acting. As for the size of total effects, negative affectivity had greater effects on emotional dissonance and emotional exhaustion, and positive affectivity had relatively large influences on job satisfaction, which indicates that it is important to increase positive affectivity to lower the emotional dissonance and exhaustion of social welfare facility employees and to decrease negative affectivity to raise their job satisfaction. Those findings will help to better understand the emotional labor of social welfare facility employees and offer some grounds for improving the working conditions at social welfare organizations.