Emotional labour and employee burnout in luxury hotels: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

The growing attention on ‘Emotional Labour’ in the hospitality sector is the result of a customer driven demand for service excellence since the late 1990s. Emotional Labour (EL) describes the management of one’s emotions to achieve specific organisational outcomes that can be performed by either faking emotion (surface acting) or by managing felt emotions to be ‘authentic’ (deep acting) (Hochschild 2012). Despite the popularity of this topic, the research regarding relationship between EL and national culture is limited. This study aims to explore the impact of Individualism/Collectivism (a common studied factor in cross-cultural research) on service workers’ EL adoption, and its negative effects on users’ well-being. An online survey questionnaire has been distributed to 130 hospitality front-line employees located in Vietnam and UK; the locations were chosen based on the scores of these countries in the individualism – collectivism index (Hofstede, 1991). The questionnaire design was based on the INDCOL survey, the Dutch Questionnaire on Emotional Labour and the Maslach Burnout Inventory. The key findings demonstrate the correlation between demographic characteristics and EL Strategies; in addition, the employee burn out dimension in relation to EL is also highlighted