A study on the relationship among empathy, display rules, emotional labor and job satisfaction:Using nurses as study sample

• Main Authors: Hsi-Yen Chang, 張希言
• Other Authors: Shu-Cheng Chi
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/66320467037666907634

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 商學研究所 === 97 === In service industry, frontline service workers play a very important role. When they contact with customers, they have to show the appropriate emotions in order to create good service quality and make benefit for the whole organization. However, the emotions which their boss wants and they truly feel are often very different. In this situation, they have emotional labor. There are two ways they can use to help them adjust emotions and show emotional labor: surface acting and deep acting. By using one of ways, they can show the “right” emotions to achieve the organization goals. Surface acting means workers express the “right” emotions by adjusting countenance, words and body language, but they don’t feel that. In the other way, deep acting means workers adjust their true feelings and thoughts to achieve their boss’ goal and show what they feel, by doing that, workers’ inner feeling and outer behaviors are no difference. In this research, we use nurses as our target, and we discuss the relationship between empathy (an important characteristic of nurses), display rules workers feel, and two ways to express emotional labor. Furthermore, we focus on the effect which surface acing and deep acting made on job satisfaction. After analyzing, we found the results: First, empathy have positive effect on deep acting, and display rules have positive on surface acting. Second, surface acting has negative acting on job satisfaction, but deep acting has positive on job satisfaction. Because job satisfaction is important for both person and organization, nurses should use deep acting to adjust feelings to improve their job satisfaction. At the same time, the forced norms should be reduced, and the training about workers’ empathy should be enhance to help workers using deep acing and heighten overall feelings about work.