QUT Digital Repository: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/29981

Lings, Ian and Durden, Geoffrey and Lee, Nick and Cadogan, John (2009) The moderating role of self-efficicy on the relationship between emotional exhaustion and job strain for boundary-spanning sevice employees. In: Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference 2009, 30 November- 2 January, 2009 , Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

© Copyright 2009 [please consult the authors].

The Moderating Role of Self-Efficacy on the Relationship Between Emotional

Exhaustion and Job Strain for Boundary-Spanning Service Employees

Ian Lings, QUT

Geoffrey DUI'den, Latrobe

Nick Lee, Aston

John Cadogan, Loughborough

Abstract

Appropriate behaviours toward customers often requires employees to suppress some genuine emotions andlor express other emotions; genuine or contrived, Managing one's emotions in this way gives rise to emotional exhaustion. This can have consequences for psychological ill health, in the form of work place strain, and ultimately employees' desire to leave. This study examines the relationships between emotional management, emotional exhaustion and turnover intentions amongst diversional therapy professionals. We ind that some forms of emotional management have a signiicant impact on emotional exhaustion and that this predicts workplace strain. Furthermore, the deleterious effects of emotional exhaustion are mitigated somewhat for employees who have strong beliefs in their ability to provide good service, compared to employees with lower self efficacy beliefs.

Introduction

Managing job strain is a major problem for service organisations, as boundary spanning employees are prone to experience high levels of role stressors and are often required to engage in emotional labour, both of which have been shown to have deleterious consequences for employees' mental and physical health (e.g., Spector, Chen, & O'Connell, 2000). The psychological strain (or distress) which is often inherent to such roles can cost organisations billions of dollars in employee disability claims, absenteeism, and lost productivity (e.g., Schaubroeck, Jones and Xie 200 I). In fact, a recent estimate by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) suggested that annual workplace absence costs the UK £12.2bn, with 23 million working days lost in 2004 to staff absenteeism. The same study also reported that the second most significant cause of absence among non-manual workers was stress. In addition to financial considerations, the employer is legally obliged to ensure that work conditions do not make employees ill. As a consequence, organisational environnlents rife with stress can lead to significant compensation claims by affected workers. Such claims can have a major negative impact on the irm, both in terms of internal culture and external image. For example, previous work has found that higher levels of stress can lead to employee aggression, sabotage, substance abuse, and other harmful employee behaviour (Chen and Specto[, 1992; Roberts, Lapidus and Chonko, 1997). While stress can be deined as a non-speciic response to an envirorunental demand (see Cooper, Dewe, and O'Driscoll, 2001), what is commonly meant when the word stress, as used in the context of lVork-related stress, is more accurately referred to a psychological strain. This is because there may in fact be a myriad negative, or even positive, specific responses to stress, with negative psychological outcomes just one of many possible responses. Psychological strain refers to psychological outcomes that are manifested in responses to organisational demands (e.g., inability to concentrate, loss of sense of worth,

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depression), and this relects more accurately what is generally meant when the word stress is used in such context. In explaining psychological strain, the Karasek's (1979) demand-control (DC) model has dominated organisational psychology in recent years (Morrison, Payne and Wall, 2003). The DC model contends that psychological strain is engendered by jobs which are highly demanding, and where employees have little control over those demands. In pat1icular, it has been argued that emotional demands are the most likely to cause stress (lapf et aI., 1999). At the same time, the role of self-eficacy in employees' strain responses to stressul work situations has also received attention (e.g. Jex et al. 2001; Schaubroeck and Merritt 1997). Speciically, it has been found that self-eficacy (one's belief in their ability to carry out a given activity or task) has an interactive effect on the relationship between stressors, relating to both job demands and controls, and strains (e.g. Meier et al. 2008). This study extends previous work exploring the moderating role of self-efficacy on the relationship between emotional exhaustion, caused by the emotional labour inherent to boundary spanning positions, and psychological health as a response to this stress. While self­eficacy has received attention as a moderator between stressors and strains in the past, little work has speciically explored its role in moderating the relationship between emotional exhaustion and psychological strain. This relationship is of critical importance to service managers since emotional demands are inherent to boundary spalU1ing work, which requires interaction with clients (JolU1son et aI., 2005; lapf et al. 1999). Understanding whether individual differences allow employees to deal with such demands without signiicant health detriments can thus help in the matching of appropriate employees to boundary positions.

Conceptual Framework

Selr Eficacy

Figure I shows our conceptual framework. The primary stressor we look at presently is emotional exhaustion, which we conceptualise as being caused by high emotional demands (emotional labour) necessitated by a particular job. Prior work has argued that emotional demands are in fact the most likely to cause stress (lapf et aI., 1999), and such demands have together been labelled emotional labour (Ashforth and Humphrey 1993). Emotional labour refers to the necessity of service operatives to display certain emotions that are seen as appropriate to that role. However, Ahsforth and Humphrey (1993) make the important point that it is the display of emotion that is necessary, not necessarily the actual feeling of certain emotions by operatives. Thus, it is conceivable that service workers feel they must display certain emotions, even if they do not feel them, and suppress certain others, when they do feel them. While there is disagreement in the empirical literature, generally research suggests that dissonance between felt emotions and the emotions that are expressed by the sen'ice worker

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should have a harmful effect (Jenkins and Maslach 1994). However, work also suggests that the valence of the emotional display can also have an inluence, as it may indicate the positive or negative interaction between service worker and client. Thus, following previous work, our model hypothesises that the expression of genuine positive emotions should decrease emotional exhaustion, given that this should indicate a positive interaction and does not require the employee to modiy the emotional that they express ( H I). However, the expression of positive emotions when not felt should increase emotional exhaustion (H2). The expression of negative emotions should result in an increase in emotional exhaustion whether genuine (H3) or not (H4) respectively, for reasons of either a negative interaction with the customer or emotional dissonance. Given that it should indicate a high level of dissonance between what is felt and what is expressed, we hypothesise that the suppression of both positive (HS) and negative (H6) emotions should increase emotional exhaustion. Stress is conceptualised as manifesting itself in various psychological and physiological symptoms, and we use the term 'psychological strain' to label the various negative psychological responses (e.g. depression, inability to concentrate, feelings of worthlessness) to emotional stressors. Consequently, and in line with Spector, Chen, & O'Connell, 2000, we hypothesise that emotional exhaustion has a positive impact on psychological strain (H7). We hypothesise also that higher levels of psychological strain should lead to higher intentions to leave the irm (H8).This general stressor-strain model has dominated work on organisational stress for a number of years (Morrison, Payne and Wall, 2003). Stress research has also investigated, in some depth, the moderating inluence of various support and coping mechanisms on the relationship between stressors and the actual manifestation of strain (e.g. Morrison, Payne and Wall, 2003). One popular mechanism has been self-efficacy, which refers to an individual's belief about their competence and likelihood of success in various aspects of their life (Salanova, Piero, and Schaufeli 2002). In line with this previous work, we hypothesise that emotional exhaustion will have a weaker inluence on job strain in individuals with high self-eficacy (H9). In other words, we hypothesise a negative interaction effect of self-eficacy on the relationship between stress and psychological strain. The reasoning behind this is that employees with high self-efficacy are likely to feel that they are better able to cope with the emotional exhaustion inherent to their job, and therefore emotional exhaustion will not manifest itself in psychological disturbance as strongly as in employees with lower in self eficacy. Of course, this is not to say that physiological strains (e.g. raised hean rate, blood pressure and other somatic complaints) may be subject to the same conditioning, but this is outside the scope of our study.

Methodology

In order to test the relationships between the constructs in our study, and in particular the role of self efficacy in moderating the relationship between emotional exhaustion and strain, we collected data in a two-stage process from front line service employees working in jobs with high levels of emotional labour. We selected the Diversional Therapy Association of NSW as an appropriate context. Diversional therapy is a service in which customers are oten physically and emotionally very dependent on the actions of service providers, and so provides a useful context in which to test these effects. The first stage involved a series of 6 depth intelviews to better understand the nature of these constructs in the context of our research. This was followed by a larger scale quantitative study designed to quantify levels of these constructs and provide insights into the relationships between them. The indings from the qualitative study showed clearly that when confidence in one's ability to do the job were lacking, the negative effects of the stressors inherent to the job manifested more severely, as

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exhibited in the following typical quote; "llell really do\Vn abolll il becallse fell like IIVenl Ihrollgh all this enery 10 make somelhing \Vork and then someone's saying "il's nol

\Vorking" Ilhinking "\Vhy, \Vhy isn 't lhis working" '" Ilelt if was somelhing abolll me and my lacilitation ol it ",

To f1lI1her investigate the relevant relationships, 520 questionnaires were posted to the full membership of the Diversional Therapy Association of NSW, A total of 129 complete responses, representing membership at all levels of the profession, were received, Respondents were overwhelmingly female (94 per cent) which is representative of the gender split in the profession, and our respondents were mostly employed in private facilities (Private 58%, Public 34%), Psychological strain was measured using the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12, Goldberg 1972), and all other measures employed are commonly used in the literature (Chen, Gully & Eden, 2001; Glomb & Tews; 2004; Maslach and lackson 1981), All items were found to load signiicantly on their respective constructs, and all average variance extracted (A YE) values and composite reliabilities exceeded 0,5 and 0,8 respectively, suggesting good evidence of convergent validity (Anderson and Gerbing 1988; Fornell and Larcker 1981), Furthermore, the AYE for each construct exceeded all the squared inter-factor correlations between that and each other construct, providing evidence of discriminant validity (Fornell and Larcker 1981), The model was tested using a partial least squares approach using SmartPLS 2,0 ( Ringle, Wende and Will 2005) in a series of hierarchical steps, To begin, a direct effects model was estimated, without the self-eicacy moderator, to provide a baseline for comparison (Chin et ai, 2003), and the results are presented below,

Base Interaction Model Model

HI Expressing genuine +ve emotions > emotional exhaustion -0,243* -0 ,243*

H2 Expressing contrived +ve emotions > emotional exhaustion 0.336' 0.336' H3 Expressing genuine -ve emotions > emotional exhaustion 0.396* 0.396*

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H4 Expressing contrived -ve emotions > emotional exhaustion -0,204 -0,204 [[5 Supressing +ve emotions > emotional exhaustion 0,085 0,085 [-[6 Supressing -ve emotions > emotional exhaustion 0,024 0,024 H7 emotional exhaustion > strain 0,609' 0,099 H8 Strain > Turnover intentions OA0 7* 0.414*

[[9 Interaction Effect 0.862*

To evaluate the adequacy of PLS model two main criteria are used; path coeicients and the RI of the latent endogenous variables. Chin (1998) suggests that path coeficients should exceed 0.1 - 0.2. [n this model we see that all path coeicients except for those describing the impact of suppressing emotions on emotional exhaustion, exceed 0.2 which suggests that the model adequately fits the data. A further test of model fit is provided by the R2 for the latent endogenous variables. Chin (1998) suggests that RI of -0.66 indicates substantial model fit, RI -0.35 moderate and RI -0.17 weak model fit. The RI for the latent endogenous variables in this study are emotional exhaustion RI=0.534, Strain R2=0.561, Turnover intentions RI=0.206. Whilst these values suggest moderate fit of the model to the data, in this case we would not expect that strain would predict all of the leaving intentions of employees as there are a multitude of other factors that would impact on these intentions. We suggest therefore that despite a low RI for turnover intentions the model is an adequate representation of the data. As can be seen, the model reveals support for hypothesis H7 indicating that emotional exhaustion is indeed a signiicant antecedent to psychological strain. For our sample we also observe that the impact of emotional labour appears to be restricted to three signiicant

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elements of emotional control; expressing genuine negative feelings and expressing contrived positive feelings both appear to increase emotional exhaustion whereas expressing genuine positive feelings appears to alleviate emotional exhaustion. Subsequently, an interaction model was tested. This model included the moderating effect of self-eficacy on the emotional exhaustion - strain relationship. This model tests all hypotheses simultaneously (although the direct effects of emotional labour on exhaustion are of course the same across both models). The path coeficient of the interaction effect of self-eficacy is also signiicant, supporting H9. The effect size of the moderator is given by f, where f = [RI (interaction model) - RI (main effects)] 1 RI (interaction model). For our model: f = (0.511-0.371 )/0.511 = 0.274 which indicates a medium effect size. Finally to confirm the direction of the moderating effect our sample was divided into two subsamples representing respondents with high and low self eficacy. These two sub samples were analysed independently and the results of the two model estimates compared. While both estimates of the relationship between emotional exhaustion and strain were positive and signiicant (low self-eficacy group = 0.75, high = 0.53), it is clear that those higher in self eficacy experienced comparatively less strain for the same level of emotional exhaustion.

Discussion and Limitations

The findings of our study suggest that managing the display of emotions (emotional labour) is indeed a significant determinant of work place stress (emotional exhaustion). However, we ind that managing the display of different emotions has different effects on emotional exhaustion. For this sample it appears that expressing genuine negative emotions gives rise to emotional exhaustion. This may arise from the nature of the service interaction, where employees feel that they should not express negative emotions to their customers Iclients, either cannot, or will not, expend the cognitive effort to suppress them, but also recognise that expressing negative emotions to clients may diminish the perceptions of the quality of service that they are providing. Expressing contrived positive emotions also increased the level of emotional exhaustion that service employees felt. This possibly reflects the burden of maintaining a cheerful and helpful demeanour when the service provider does not feel this way. Expressing genuine positive emotions alleviated emotional exhaustion and possibly this reflects the idea that positive emotions enhance the client's perceptions of the service provided and consequently, are desirable; expressing these genuine feelings does not require cognitive effort to manage the display of emotion. Interestingly, expressing contrived negative emotions did not have any signiicant impact on emotional exhaustion. This finding may relect the nature of the service under consideration. For diversional therapists, it is unlikely that contrived negative emotions are called for. In this sample suppressing emotions did not have any significant impact on emotional labour. This may be interpreted as meaning that the suppression of genuine emotions is not a stressul activity, which is counterintuitive and contrary to previous research in this area. An altenative explanation may be that the episodic nature of the service does not require employees to suppress negative emotions for sustained periods of time, neither does it require employees to suppress positive emotions at all, consequently emotional exhaustion does not arise. Our indings that the impact of emotional exhaustion on strain is mitigated somewhat by self efficacy suggests that employees who are more conident in their ability to provide a service can withstand higher levels of emotional labour and emotional exhaustion than employees who are less self contident. This suggests the importance of training and support from service managers to reassure employees of their eficacy in their role. This is particularly important in the context of diversional therapy where clients may be severely cognitively impaired and

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may not be able to provide feedback (verbal or non verbal) to the service provider. This lack of reinforcement reduces the opportunities for service employees to learn through operant conditioning that may be available in more mainstream service encounters. Consequently, reinforcement from other sources becomes more important. Finally, .lture research should test this framework in other service settings to establish its general applicability to the service encounter.

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