Beyond deep and surface acting: perceived emotional effort in customer service roles

Emotional Labour (EL) is a central feature of customer service roles, which refers to the effort employees exert in order to manage the emotions required by their role. Despite the emphasis placed upon “effort”, the instruments developed to measure EL have been focused on the strategies “deep acting” (i.e. changing your own feelings to achieve the required display) and “surface acting” (i.e. changing only the outward display). The lack of consistent findings, however, reveals the limited explanatory power of deep and surface acting as predictors of employees’ well being. Initial evidence from qualitative studies has started to emerge and suggests that the effort employees perceive to perform EL could be a better predictor of employees’ well being. Based on these findings and building on relevant stress theory, we present the development and initial validation of the perceived emotional effort construct.