Abstract

As competition for better service between corporations is getting fierce, many efforts to improve service quality are being made endlessly. The quality of service is directly associated with customer satisfaction and the employee performance of emotional labor is a key factor to attain a high level of customer review and better corporation image. This study examines an influence of emotional labor on job stress and customer orientation in the context of a service franchise firm. The results are as follow. First, deep acting of emotional labor has a negative influence on job stress, and surface acting of emotional labor has a negative influence on customer orientation. Also, job stress has a negative influence on customer orientation. Second, deep acting of emotional labor does not have a positive influence on customer orientation. Third, surface acting of emotional labor does not have a positive influence on job stress. The findings of this study show that deep acting of service based on an employee emotion can produce the employee's better service attitude by decreasing employees' job stress, but standardized surface acting of service cannot. Therefore, franchisor needs to use employees' deep acting to improve the franchisee service quality.