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Is it Better to Give or Receive? The Role of Help in Buffering the Depleting Effects of
Surface Acting
Marilyn A. Uy
Nanyang Technological University
Division of Strategy, Management and Organisation
Nanyang Business School
50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798 SINGAPORE
Email: muy@ntu.edu.sg; Phone: (65) 67906926
Katrina Jia Lin
National University of Singapore
Department of Management and Organisation,
Business School, National University of Singapore,
BIZ2-01-03, 1 Business Link, Singapore 117592 SINGAPORE
Email: jia.lin@nus.edu.sg;Phone: (65) 65161344
Remus Ilies
National University of Singapore
Department of Management and Organisation,
Business School, National University of Singapore,
BIZ1-08-53, 15 Kent Ridge Drive, Singapore 119245 SINGAPORE
Email: ilies@nus.edu.sg;Phone: (65) 66011704
In press at Academy of Management Journal
Acknowledgments: We would like to thank the participants of the Strategy, Management and
Organization Research Exchange Seminar (S’MORES) at the Nanyang Technological University
for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. This study was partially supported by the
Singapore Ministry of Education Research Project R-317-000-098-133 provided via NUS
Business School to Remus Ilies. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Academy
of Management Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC, Canada, August 2015.
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Is it Better to Give or Receive? The Role of Help in Buffering the Depleting Effects of
Surface Acting
ABSTRACT
The resource depleting effect of surface acting is well established. Yet we know less about the
pervasiveness of this depleting effect and what employees can do at work to replenish their
resources. Drawing on conservation of resources theory and the ecological congruence model,
we examine the extended depleting effect of surface acting and whether social interactions with
coworkers (i.e., giving and receiving help) can mitigate the negative consequences of emotional
labor by conducting a five-day diary study among customer service representatives (CSRs).
Momentary reports from 102 CSRs indicate that within-person daily surface acting positively
predicted end-of-day emotional exhaustion, and the effect of emotional exhaustion spilled over
to work engagement the following day. Analyzing the within-person moderating effects of
giving and receiving help at work, we find that giving help buffered the depletion process while
receiving help did not. We discuss the theoretical and practical significance of considering the
temporality of the resource depleting effects of surface acting, the role of at-work help giving in
buffering the negative effect of emotional labor that could affect the sense of self, and the
importance of resource congruence in influencing the efficacy of buffering effects.
Keywords: surface acting; emotional exhaustion; work engagement; helping; moderated
mediation
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As firms streamline service interactions to prioritize speed and efficiency, delivering
high-quality customer service becomes more demanding than ever before (Zapf, 2002). Service
employees are typically expected to adhere to display rules which require expressing positive
emotions and suppressing negative emotions during customer interactions (Hochschild, 1983;
Zapf & Holz, 2006). Highly standardized “speed-up” conditions are more conducive for surface
acting (Hochschild, 1983), a type of emotional labor (or the effort required to manage one’s
emotions) that involves feigning emotional responses according to what the situation requires in
line with the display rules to fit the context (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Grandey, Fisk, &
Steiner, 2005). Past studies, including two meta-analyses, reveal that surface acting is harmful to
employee well-being (Bono & Vey, 2005; Grandey, 2003; Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011), because
surface acting consistently predicted emotional exhaustion—defined as “a state of depleted
work-related emotional and motivational resources” (Halbesleben, Wheeler, & Paustian-
Underdahl, 2013: 493).
While extant research unequivocally emphasized the psychological costs of surface
acting, there are a few issues that remain unclear. The first question concerns whether the
deleterious consequences of surface acting are only confined within a specific workday or
whether these effects carry forward to affect one’s work the following day. Despite attempts of
past emotional labor studies that incorporated temporality, they have done so to the extent of
addressing the work-to-home domain spillover effects of surface acting within the same day
(Wagner, Barnes, & Scott, 2014), and using two-wave surveys that focused on the directionality
of the (between-person) relationship between emotional labor and well-being (Cote & Morgan,
2002; Hülsheger, Lang, & Maier, 2010). As such, illuminating the temporal nature of the
depleting effects of surface acting from day to day is far from resolved.
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The second question involves what service employees themselves can do to mitigate the
depleting effects brought about by surface acting. Particularly, if indeed the consequences of
surface acting are enduring and could even spill over to the following workday, it begs the
important question of what employees can do during the workday to mitigate the negative effects
of surface acting, before they even leave the office to go home. In the recovery literature,
scholars have argued for the importance of off-work opportunities such as weekends, free
evenings, and vacations to thwart the emergence of burnout (Fritz & Sonnentag, 2006; Rook &
Zijlstra, 2006; Sonnentag, 2003; Westman & Eden, 1997), and within-day work breaks including
lunch breaks (Trougakos, Beal, Green, & Weiss, 2008; Trougakos, Hideg, Cheng, & Beal, 2014).
However, scholars theorized that restorative opportunities can also happen during the workday as
some work-related interactions can actually be restorative (Lilius, 2012). Given that most people
spend a large proportion of their total waking hours in the workplace, empirical research on
restorative interactions during work is somewhat surprisingly lacking. In this study, we
complement and extend the recovery literature, which to date has predominantly examined off-
work breaks and activities, by focusing on the restorative functions of work-related social
interactions.
We examine the carryover effects of surface acting from one workday to the next.
Specifically, we focus on the effect of surface acting on next-day work engagement which
indicates the individual’s level of personal investment at work (Christian, Garza, & Slaughter,
2011; Kahn, 1990; Rich, Lepine, & Crawford, 2010). Taking a within-person approach, we
theorize why the harmful effects of surface acting extend to the following day’s work
engagement through emotional exhaustion. Moreover, taking an agentic perspective (Bandura,
1989), we propose that service employees can do something at work to offset the depletion
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process brought about by emotional labor. We propose that the harmful effects of non-
autonomous and externally controlled surface acting can be offset by helping colleagues at
work—the former tends to jeopardize the sense of self while the latter restores it. Drawing on
Hobfoll’s ecological congruence or “fitting of resources” (1998: 172) which suggests that a
matching of resource dynamics is needed to minimize net loss of resources or ensure net gain of
resources, we theorize that helping coworkers could buffer the depletion process. Since helping
colleagues tends to be autonomous and self-determined, i.e., an activity “initiated and regulated
through choice as an expression of oneself” (Deci & Ryan, 1987: 1024), it accommodates the
experience of regaining one’s sense of self.
We also compared the buffering effect of helping coworkers with that of receiving help
from coworkers. Receiving help from coworkers is likewise a resource gain dynamic, as the
focal employee (recipient) obtains support and informational resources that facilitate task
accomplishment (Chiaburu & Harrison, 2008; Grandey & Gabriel, 2014). However, unlike
giving help, receiving help at work could be less efficacious in restoring one’s sense of self
because although help from coworkers may provide information and support, receiving help may
not enhance one’s self-concept (and may in fact threaten it). Thus, by examining differential
moderating effects of giving and receiving help on depletion following emotional labor, we seek
support for our theorizing that resources connected to the employees’ sense of self are crucial to
employee engagement.
Taken together, our study advances conservation of resources (COR) theory which is the
most often invoked theoretical perspective when studying the depleting effects of emotional
labor (Grandey & Gabriel, 2014). However, like other resource-based organizational theories,
COR has been often criticized for being too broad and imprecise (Halbesleben, Neveu, Paustian-
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Underdahl, & Westman, 2014; Priem & Butler, 2001). Thus, our overall contribution is to
develop a more focused resource-based model by considering (a) the temporality of the resource
depleting effects of surface acting; (b) the role of autonomous activities in buffering negative
effects of surface acting; and (c) the role of resource congruence in influencing the efficacy of
buffering effects.
THEORY AND HYPOTHESES
Surface Acting, End-of-day Emotional Exhaustion, and Next-day Work Engagement
Our prediction that surface acting will positively relate to emotional exhaustion within
individuals is based on theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that surface acting entails
effortful emotional regulation which could result in depletion of personal resources (Grandey,
2003; Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011; Trougakos, Cheng, Hideg, & Zweig, 2015). Notably, surface
acting is detrimental to employee well-being because it threatens the individual’s sense of self
(Hochschild, 1983; Pugh, Groth, & Hennig-Thurau, 2011). Erickson and Wharton underscored
that “attempts to control the emotions of workers reach into the very heart of an individual’s
sense of self” (1997: 192). Being an internal resource (or coming from the domain of the self),
the sense of self may not be easily replenished once depleted (Hobfoll, 1988, 1998).
Further, we go beyond prior research to hypothesize that surface acting could jeopardize
work engagement indirectly through emotional exhaustion. As COR underscores, individuals
are “motivated to obtain, retain, foster, and protect those things that they value” (Westman,
Hobfoll, Chen, Davidson, & Laski, 2005: 168). The resource loss experience makes the
individual adopt a defensive posture to protect one’s limited resources and minimize further
resource loss (Hobfoll, 1989, 1998). Importantly, work engagement involves people harnessing
their full selves to “employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally
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during role performance” (Kahn, 1990: 694). People who exhibit high work engagement bring
their whole selves within the work role they are performing and perform their work roles in a
connected, as opposed to fragmented, manner (Kahn, 1992). Highly engaged employees have an
enhanced feeling of the agentic self as they are physically, cognitively, and “emotionally
connected to their work and to others in the service of their work”(Rich et al, 2010: 619; italics
added for emphasis). We thus believe work engagement is an indicator of the extent to which
one expends (or conserves) one’s sense of self at work. 1
Kahn (1990) argued that emotional energy influences one’s psychological availability to
engage, and specifically mentioned the need for emotional energy as a requirement for personal
engagement in tasks requiring emotional labor. Because emotional energy (indicated by low
emotional exhaustion) is necessary for one’s complete self-investment and self-expression at
work, we propose that end-of-day emotional exhaustion (brought about by surface acting) will
result in lower work engagement the next day. Emotional exhaustion, an indicator of resource
depletion (Alarcon, 2011), has been conceptualized to have pervasive and enduring temporal
qualities (Gaines & Jermier, 1983). Research has shown that on a daily basis, the depleting effect
of surface acting is pervasive, with service employees experiencing emotional exhaustion in the
evening at home (Wagner et al., 2014). Additionally, we argue that such depleting effect will
linger to influence employees’ work engagement the next day, even with the potential restorative
1 The resources one uses at work can be physical, cognitive and emotional, yet engagement “involves a holistic
investment of the entire self in terms of cognitive, emotional, and physical energies”(Christian, Garza, & Slaughter,
2011: 97); therefore, engagement should not be considered the opposite pole of depletion indicators for any one of
the three types of energy. Because our focus is on examining the effects of emotional labor, we naturally focus on
emotional resources and we operationalize emotional resource loss as heightened emotional exhaustion. Schaufeli
and colleagues extended this line of thought by proposing a more nuanced operational (dimensional) definition of
engagement, as “a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and
absorption” (2002: 74). Yet, work engagement is a broader and more complex construct than vigor, which many
tend to regard as the opposite of exhaustion (see Saks & Gruman, 2014). Notably, engagement “is not simply about
the vigor with which people work, their high levels of involvement. It is about putting ourselves – our real selves –
into the work” (Kahn, 2010: 21). It logically follows that work engagement and emotional exhaustion are different
constructs in terms of meaning, breadth, and phenomenology.
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process provided by sleep (Barnes, 2012). Sleep may be more efficacious in restoring physical
resources than other types of resources, such as emotional resources which are at the heart of
one’s sense of the self, as surface acting depletes the emotion reservoir while sleep replenishes
the sleep reservoir (Barnes & Van Dyne, 2009). While sleep restores one’s physical energy, it
may not directly replenish one’s emotional energy (Spreitzer, Fritz, & Lam, 2016). Taken
together, sleep is less likely to mitigate end-of-day emotional exhaustion, and thus we expect a
spillover of the effect of emotional exhaustion to the following day’s work engagement.
Hypothesis 1a: At the within-individual level, daily surface acting at work is positively
related to end-of-day emotional exhaustion.
Hypothesis 1b: At the within-individual level, end-of-day emotional exhaustion is
negatively related to next-day work engagement.
Hypothesis 1c: At the within-individual level, end-of-day emotional exhaustion mediates
the relationship between surface acting at work and next-day work engagement.
Giving and Receiving Help at Work as Moderators
Since resource depletion can progressively gain momentum and lead to unfavorable
individual and organizational outcomes, recovery is necessary for employees to offset resources
that were lost and prevent such negative spirals from developing (Hobfoll, 2001; Westman et al.,
2005). Although the service industry is characterized by continuous interactions with customers,
customer service representatives or CSRs also interact with their coworkers. From the
organization’s perspective, at-work interpersonal helping and supportive behaviors among CSRs
are beneficial because these behaviors positively predict increased customer satisfaction and the
organization’s market performance (Chuang & Liao, 2010; Susskind, Kacmar, & Borchgrevink,
2003). From the CSR’s perspective, not only do these at-work interactions among coworkers
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provide work-related information and facilitate problem solving, but they also provide emotional
support to enhance employee morale (Susskind et al., 2003). Service employees could talk to
their coworkers to cope with negative experiences after encountering difficult customers (Bailey
& McCollough, 2000). Besides social sharing, work-related social interactions, such as giving
and receiving help among coworkers, may also cushion the resource depletion experienced by
service employees. Giving and receiving help at work are part of heedful relating (Spreitzer,
Sutcliffe, Dutton, Sonenshein, & Grant, 2005) which involves employees operating attentively to
those around them, and coworkers looking out for each other to accomplish the goals of the
organization (Weick & Roberts, 1993) and may effectively facilitate employees’ emotional
energy replenishment (Spreitzer et al., 2016). Overall, interpersonal helping episodes among
coworkers could potentially serve as at-work restorative opportunities in the customer service
setting.
We hypothesize helping coworkers to buffer the resource depleting effects of
surface acting. As stated earlier, engaging in surface acting could pose a difficult challenge
to one’s sense of self because one cannot simply express what one truly feels; instead,
one’s expressions and behaviors have to comply with the display rules imposed by the
organization (Hochschild, 1983), not by the self. Autonomy is experienced when one’s
actions are endorsed by the self and are governed by the self (Ryan & Deci, 2006).
Trougakos and Hideg (2009) argued that resource loss may be offset by engaging in
preferred activities which are conducted out of one’s free will as opposed to activities
which are forced or mandatory. Helping coworkers, which is analogous to organizational
citizenship behavior directed at individual coworkers (OCB-I), tends to be performed out
of one’s volition (Organ, 1988) and allows for the experience of autonomy (Weinstein &
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Ryan, 2010). Most scholars emphasize autonomy in their treatise of OCB. There is also
substantial empirical evidence that autonomy/intrinsic choice and OCB-I are correlated
(Piccolo & Colquitt, 2006; Rubin, Dierdorff, & Bachrach, 2013; Williams & Anderson,
1991) and that prosocial giving or helping satisfies individuals’ need for autonomy
(Martela & Ryan, 2016; Weinstein & Ryan, 2010).
Therefore, although giving help may also be resource costly as it can be physically
exhausting and takes time and energy (Bergeron, 2007), helping coworkers is an activity
that allows the CSR to gain back the sense of self that was lost from excessive surface
acting (Hobfoll, 1988). We argue that helping colleagues could serve as an effective buffer
of the depletion process (i.e., losing one’s sense of self) brought about by daily surface
acting because helping colleagues is an “internal” choice, i.e., autonomous and endorsed
by the self, allowing the CSR to regain the sense of self which is necessary for work
engagement to occur.
To further clarify and substantiate the robustness of our aforementioned arguments, we
compared the relative effects of helping colleagues with that of receiving help from colleagues in
buffering the depletion process brought about by surface acting. Receiving help from coworkers
is a resource gain dynamic because of the information and support offered by coworkers in the
process (Chiaburu & Harrison, 2008). Extant organizational studies on giving and receiving help
seem fragmented, because most of them focused exclusively on either giving help or receiving
help, but rarely on both (for exceptions, please see Grodal, Nelson, & Siino, 2015, and
Halbesleben & Wheeler, 2015). Taking a step further and extending current literature, we adopt a
more comprehensive perspective by testing the buffering effects of within-person at-work help
giving alongside at-work help receiving. While both can be regarded as resource gain dynamics
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that can potentially offset the loss cycle (Halbesleben et al., 2014; Westman et al., 2005), we
hypothesize that giving help will be a stronger moderator compared to receiving help because the
former tends to be voluntary and self-initiated and thus has the potential to restore resources
connected to employees’s sense of self which is essential for work engagement.
One can plausibly argue that receiving help from colleagues may alleviate the emotional
display requirements as emotions may be experienced more naturally in a supportive
environment (Grandey, 2000; Kinman, Wray, & Strange, 2011). Receiving help also suggests
that coworkers care about the focal employee’s well-being (Rhoades & Eisenberger, 2002).
Previous research suggests that support and help received from others could buffer the impact of
occupational stressors on strain experienced by employees (Cohen & Wills, 1985). Between-
person studies relevant to the buffering effects of receiving help from coworkers indicate that
coworker support (analogous to receiving help from coworkers) could mitigate the relationship
between non-rewarding work and job satisfaction (Ducharme & Martin, 2000). Employees who
receive help and support from coworkers tend to be protected against the negative impact of
unfair treatment in the workplace (Sloan, 2012). While past studies reveal workplace support
could mitigate the impact of emotional labor on exhaustion and job satisfaction (Duke, Goodman,
Treadway, & Breland, 2009; Kinman et al., 2011), they employed cross-sectional designs and
focused only on the availability of help/support instead of receiving help. We go beyond
previous research by employing a repeated-measures design and considering the moderating
effects of both giving and receiving help.
Hobfoll (1988) alluded to ecological congruence or fitting of resources, which implies
that for a particular resource gain dynamic to offset a resource loss process, we need to look at
how such gain dynamic matches up with what is actually lost. In other words, resource gain
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strategies are not interchangeable, and depending on what the situation calls for, certain gain
dynamics may be more potent than others in mitigating the loss cycle. While receiving help from
colleagues implies that the focal employee obtains resources that tend to facilitate task
accomplishment, it is ambiguous how information and social support could replenish the
individual’s sense of self. More importantly, it is unclear whether receiving help is connected to
regaining one’s sense of self.
While both are resource-gain activities, based on the ecological congruence model
(Hobfoll, 1988), not all resource-gain activities are created equal, and so the more efficacious
moderator would be the one that allows for the experience of restoring the sense of self.
Compared to helping colleagues, receiving help from colleagues does not promote the
experience of autonomy. In addition, receiving help from colleagues could actually dampen
one’s agentic self. Studies have shown receiving help from others can be self-threatening
(Deelstra et al., 2003; Fisher, Nadler, & Whitcher-Alagna, 1982) as it could suggest a lack of
competence which compromises one’s sense of self (Van Yperen & Hagedoorn, 2003).
Conversely, as discussed earlier, helping coworkers is regarded as self-initiated and voluntary
(Van Dyne & LePine, 1998). Perhaps it is not the act of helping per se but the experience of
autonomy involved in the process that facilitates restoring the sense of self. On the one hand,
helping customers defines the entire job of CSRs, and as such, this type of helping is mandatory
and imposed by the organization. On the other hand, helping colleagues is a voluntary choice
activity, which means CSRs are not forced to engage in helping colleagues at work, and thus
regarded as autonomous and endorsed by the self.
Therefore, we hypothesize the following:
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Hypothesis 2a: At the within-individual level, at-work help giving buffers the mediated
relationship between surface acting and next-day work engagement through end-of-day
emotional exhaustion such that the mediated relationship is weaker if at-work help giving
is high.
Hypothesis 2b: At the within-individual level, the buffering effect of at-work help giving
on the mediated relationship between surface acting and next-day work engagement
through end-of-day emotional exhaustion will be stronger than the buffering effect of at-
work help receiving.
METHOD
Participants and Procedures
Participants consisted of full-time CSRs recruited from an inbound call center in
Singapore. An inbound call center is one that has customers initiating contact with the call center
to request for assistance regarding matters such as complaints about defective products, purchase
orders (e.g., ticket sales), technical support for equipment or gadgets, rectifying billing errors, to
name a few. This is different from an outbound call center where calls are initiated by CSRs
themselves to sell products/services, ask for donations, among others. Emotional labor is
prevalent especially in inbound call centers because CSRs are required to provide high-quality
professional service and maintain positive customer interactions even in the wake of abusive and
frustrating encounters with customers (Holman, Chissick, & Totterdell, 2002; Wilk & Moynihan,
2005). The daily work experience of CSRs in call centers is often depicted as “a series of minor
complaints assuming major proportions for the customers” (Macdonald & Sirianni, 1996: 17).
CSRs are often the subject of customer irritation and mistreatment despite not being the cause of
the problem (Mullen & Kelloway, 2013). At the time of the study, the call center has been
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operating for over seven years and caters mostly to multinational companies operating in the
Asia-Pacific region.
We recruited participants through the Human Resource (HR) Director who disseminated
the study advertisement (which included a short description of the study and the incentive to be
given after completing the study) to 250 full-time CSRs; 140 CSRs expressed interest and
attended the study orientation conducted by one of the authors. Participants completed an online
survey on their demographic and background information. A week after completing the online
background survey, each participant completed paper-and-pencil daily surveys for five working
days. During the orientation, we instructed participants to complete the daily surveys carefully
and honestly. The daily survey consisted of the start-of-day/before-work positive and negative
affect survey (we controlled for the effects of before-work affect states, as we will explain in the
measures section), the work survey which participants completed at the end of the workday
before leaving the office, and the home survey which participants completed before they went to
bed. Each participant was also instructed to deposit the completed before-work survey and work
survey in a survey drop box before leaving the office and to drop off the home survey in the
same drop box the following day before starting work. Each participant claimed a new set of
surveys from the HR Director’s office to be completed on each specific working day. These
procedures of depositing completed surveys and claiming new sets of surveys went on for five
working days, with one of the authors collecting the surveys from the drop box and issuing new
surveys at the call center every day for the entire duration of the study. Participants were
compensated in Singapore Dollars to the equivalent of US$60.
Among the 140 CSRs who attended the orientation and completed the background survey,
33 participants did not proceed with daily surveys, and 5 participants completed matched surveys
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only for one day; hence, the final sample consisted of 102 participants (59% women). The
average age was 28 years (SD = 8.58). About 37% of them were married, and most of them were
Chinese (38%), while the rest were Filipinos (28%), Malays (26%), and others (8%). Regarding
education attainment, 31% were college graduates, while 18% completed diploma courses, and
slightly more than half of them finished high school. From our final sample of 102 CSRs, we
received 486 completed diary surveys out of 510 potential surveys (response rate = 95.29%).
We compared the 38 participants who were excluded from data analyses with the final sample in
terms of age, gender, marital status, race and highest educational attainment and found no
significant differences (all p-values exceed .10) on all factors except race, i.e., there were more
Malays in the excluded sample.
Measures
We gathered our focal variables at three time points every day for five consecutive days.
Given the repeated nature of our research design, we referred to studies that used experience
sampling techniques or daily diary method which typically employ shortened versions of surveys
to alleviate participant response burden and increase response rates (Beal & Weiss, 2003; Fisher
& To, 2012). We ensured that our overall survey length reasonably captured our key constructs
without imposing undue response burden to our participants.
Surface acting and deep acting. We measured surface acting and deep acting at the end
of the CSRs’ workday before leaving the office using items from the emotional labor scale
developed by Brotheridge and Lee (2003) and Grandey (2003). Participants indicated the extent
to which they engaged in emotional labor on a scale of 1 (“never”) to 5 (“always”). We used five
items to measure surface acting. Sample items include “Today I faked a good mood” and “Today
I pretended to have emotions that I did not really have.” The average coefficient alpha was 0.85.
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We measured deep acting using three items and included it as a control variable. Examples
include “Today, I tried to actually experience the emotions I must show” and “Today, I really
tried to feel the emotions I have to show as part of my job.” The average coefficient alpha was
0.84.
Work engagement. We measured CSRs’ work engagement at the end of the workday
before leaving the office using the five-item daily work engagement scale (2 items for vigor, 2
items for dedication, and 1 item for absorption) by Bledow and colleagues (2011) adapted from
the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzales-Roma, & Bakker, 2002).
CSRs indicated the extent of their agreement to each statement describing their experiences at
work on that day (1 = “strongly disagree”; 5 = “strongly agree”). An example is “At my work
today, I felt bursting with energy.” The average coefficient alpha was 0.92.
Emotional exhaustion. We measured emotional exhaustion at home before CSRs went to
bed. Following the study by Teuchmann, Totterdell, and Parker (1999), we measured emotional
exhaustion using two items from the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach & Jackson, 1981) on
a 1 to 5 scale (1 = “very slightly or not at all”; 5 = “extremely”). Items include “I am feeling
emotionally drained now” and “I am feeling burned out now.” Internal consistency reliability
was 0.90.
Giving help. We measured giving help to coworkers at work before leaving the office
using the eight-item scale developed by Lee and Allen (2002), which was used to measure OCB-
I. Participants were asked to indicate the extent to which they helped colleagues at work that day
(1 = “never”; 5 = “always”). An example is “Today, I willingly gave my time to help colleagues
who had work-related problems”. The average reliability was 0.90.
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Receiving help. We measured receiving help at work using three items from the scale
developed by Spence, Brown, Keeping and Lian (2013). CSRs were asked to indicate the extent
to which they received help at work that day (1 = “never”; 5 = “always”). The focus or source of
receiving help was colleagues at work. We clarified this point to all participants during
orientation when we went over the survey items. An example is “Someone went out of his/her
way to help me today.” The average coefficient alpha was 0.88.
State positive and negative affect as controls. We controlled for CSRs’ daily before-
work affect states because previous research found significant linkages between affect and
emotional labor (Scott, Barnes, & Wagner, 2012; Scott & Barnes, 2011), helping behaviors
(Carlson, Charlin, & Miller, 1988; Ilies, Scott, & Judge, 2006; Salovey, Mayer, & Rosenhan,
1991), and performance (Rothbard & Wilk, 2011). We measured CSRs’ start-of-day positive and
negative affect before starting work. We used the shortened scale of the Positive and Negative
Affect Schedule (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) which has been used in previous repeated-
measure studies (e.g., Foo, Uy, & Baron, 2009; Song, Foo, & Uy, 2008). Participants indicated
on a 5-point scale the extent to which they felt each item at that particular moment (1 = “very
slightly or not at all”, 5 = “extremely”). The average reliability across days was 0.91 for positive
affect and 0.80 for negative affect.
Analytical Strategy
We nested day-level data within each participant. Since our main focus was within-
individual relationships, we used Mplus 7 (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2012) to conduct path
analyses in the unconflated multilevel modeling framework (Zhang, Zyphur, & Preacher, 2009)
to avoid biased estimations of indirect effects, which were often found in conventional multilevel
modeling approaches (Preacher, Zyphur, & Zhang, 2010). Other studies that focused on within-
18
individual moderating effects and indirect effects also used this method (Huang, Chiaburu,
Zhang, Li, & Grandey, 2015). For all Level 1 variables, we used group mean-centering (that is,
centering each individual’s scores on a particular variable relative to the individual’s mean on
that variable score). Because our hypotheses involved two Level 1 moderators, we computed the
product terms by group-mean centering the main variables (i.e., daily surface acting, giving help,
and receiving help), and multiplied the mean-centered scores of the respective variables (Huang
et al., 2015; Sonnentag & Binnewies, 2013). To calculate effect sizes, we computed pseudo-R2
values based on Hofmann and colleagues’ (2000) suggestions and followed existing studies
using similar multilevel designs (Koopman, Lanaj, & Scott, 2016; Lanaj, Johnson, & Barnes,
2014) to assess the amount of within-individual variance explained by our study variables.
We present our overall research model in Figure 1. Although not shown in Figure 1, we
controlled for the effects of before-work positive and negative affect states and daily deep acting
on end-of-day emotional exhaustion. We decided to include before-work positive and negative
affect as control variables instead of featuring them as key constructs in our research model to
distinguish our contribution from prior studies that have already found significant mood effects
(Rothbard & Wilk, 2011; Scott et al., 2012; Scott & Barnes, 2011). For lagged analyses, we used
next-day work engagement as the dependent variable and controlled for current day’s work
engagement (i.e., we controlled for day T work engagement when analyzing the effects on day
T+1 work engagement).
-------------------------------------
Insert Figure 1 about here
--------------------------------------
RESULTS
19
Table 1 provides the means, standard deviations, percentages of within-person variance
and correlations among the study variables. Results show nontrivial within-person variance for
surface acting (34%), work engagement (33%), emotional exhaustion (39%), giving help (23%)
and receiving help (35%). Consistent with the literature, within-person correlations reveal
surface acting related positively with emotional exhaustion (r = 0.19, p < .01), and negatively
with work engagement measured on the same day (r = -0.22, p <.01).
---------------------------------------------------
Insert Table 1 about here
----------------------------------------------------
Table 2 presents the results of the mediation and moderated mediation hypotheses testing
using a within-person approach. Hypothesis 1a states that daily surface acting is positively
related to end-of-day emotional exhaustion. As shown in Table 2, this hypothesis was supported
(γ = 0.28, p < .01). Surface acting accounted for 24.6% within-individual variance in end-of-day
emotional exhaustion. Hypothesis 1b posits a negative relationship between end-of-day
emotional exhaustion (day T) and next-day work engagement (day T+1). This hypothesis was
also supported (γ = -0.14, p < .01). We found that 7% of the within person variance in next-day
work engagement was explained by end-of-day emotional exhaustion. Hypothesis 1c states that
end-of-day emotional exhaustion mediates the relationship between daily surface acting and
next-day work engagement. To test this indirect effect, we followed the distribution-by-product
method to calculate the indirect effect and to generate the 90% confidence interval (CI) using
Monte Carlo simulation with 20,000 replications (Selig & Preacher, 2008). Results showed that
the indirect effect was -0.04 (90% CI = -0.07, -0.01), supporting Hypothesis 1c.
---------------------------------------------------
20
Insert Table 2 about here
----------------------------------------------------
Both Hypotheses 2a and 2b involve a first-stage moderated mediation model. We tested
whether giving help would buffer the indirect relationship between daily surface acting and next-
day work engagement through end-of-day emotional exhaustion (2a), and compared the relative
moderating effects of giving and receiving help, with the former expected to be a stronger
moderator than the latter (2b). Results from Table 2 indicated that giving help moderated the
relationship between daily surface acting and end-of-day emotional exhaustion (γ = -0.36, p
<.05). However, receiving help did not moderate this relationship (γ = 0.14, p >.10). We
compared the moderating effects of giving and receiving help by using Mplus to compute the
difference between the two coefficients and to test whether the difference score is significantly
different from zero. Results showed that these two moderating effects differed significantly
(difference = -0.50, s.e. = 0.24, p < .05). Therefore, Hypotheses 2a and 2b obtained support.
Taken together, the moderated mediation model explained 25.4% of the within-person variance
in end-of-day emotional exhaustion and 8.5% of the within-person variance in next-day work
engagement.
We used the tool developed by Preacher, Curran, and Bauer (2006) to conduct simple
slopes analysis to examine the pattern of the moderating effect of giving help. We present the
interaction in Figure 2. Results showed that, on days when the CSR gave less help (i.e., 1 SD
below the mean), surface acting at work positively predicted end-of-day emotional exhaustion
(simple slope = 0.44, p < .01); while on days when individuals gave more help (i.e., 1 SD above
the mean), surface acting was not related to end-of-day emotional exhaustion (simple slope =
0.12, p >.10). We further examined whether the indirect effect on days when individuals gave
21
less help differed from the indirect effect on days when individuals gave more help. We found
that on days when individuals gave less help, the indirect effect was -0.06 (90% CI = -0.10, -
0.02), whereas on days when individuals gave more help, the indirect effect was -0.02 (90% CI =
-0.05, 0.01). The magnitude of the indirect effect in the lower giving-help condition is
significantly larger than that in higher giving-help condition (difference = 0.04, 90% CI = 0.004,
0.077). Taken together, giving help buffered the daily resource depletion effect (i.e., the indirect
effect was not significant on days when employees gave more help) while receiving help did not.
-------------------------------------
Insert Figure 2 about here
--------------------------------------
Additional Analyses
Given that positive affect could “undo” the effects of negative experiences
(Fredrickson, Mancuso, Branigan, & Tugade, 2000), we conducted further analysis to
verify whether positive affect moderated the link between surface acting and emotional
exhaustion. We found that although before-work positive affect positively related to at-
work help giving (γ = 0.12, s.e. = 0.05, p < .05), the buffering effect of positive affect on
the link between surface acting and emotional exhaustion was not significant (γ = 0.21, s.e.
= 0.17, p > .10); and this finding did not change when we removed giving help from the
model (γ = 0.17, s.e. = 0.17, p > .10). These results suggest that it is giving help itself and
not positive affect that buffers the link between surface acting and emotional exhaustion.
Moreover, given past research suggesting that work engagement also consumes resources
(Halbesleben, Harvey, & Bolino, 2009), we tested alternative models, particularly whether
surface acting and work engagement would predict emotional exhaustion, and whether emotional
22
exhaustion would predict next-day surface acting and next-day work engagement. Results
indicate that work engagement was not significantly related to emotional exhaustion (γ = -0.14,
s.e. = 0.08, p > .10), but surface acting was significantly related to emotional exhaustion (γ =
0.25, s.e. = 0.09, p < .01). Emotional exhaustion was not significantly related to next-day surface
acting (γ = 0.07, s.e. = 0.06, p > .10), but was significantly related to next-day work engagement
(γ = 0.14, s.e. = 0.05, p < .01). Overall, the significant indirect effect was consistent with our
hypothesis (surface acting to end-of-day emotional exhaustion to next-day work engagement;
indirect effect = -0.03, 90% CI: -0.06, -0.01); while the opposite direction (work engagement to
end-of-day emotional exhaustion to next-day surface acting) was not significant. That we did not
find significant reverse relationships is consistent with past research that failed to find support
for the reverse link between outcome variables (i.e., job performance and strain) and surface
acting (Hülsheger et al., 2010). When we added giving and receiving help as moderators, our
results indicate that giving help moderated the link between surface acting and emotional
exhaustion (γ = -0.40, s.e. = 0.17, p < .05), but not the link between work engagement and
emotional exhaustion (γ = -0.13, s.e. = 0.15, p > .10). Receiving help did not moderate either
relationship (γ = 0.16, s.e. = 0.09, p > .10; and γ = 0.02, s.e. = 0.11, p > .10). To further examine
the depleting effect of surface acting, we tested whether surface acting on day T was related to
emotional exhaustion measured before bedtime on day T+1 while controlling for emotional
exhaustion on day T. However, neither surface acting on day T (γ = -0.002, s.e. = 0.114, p > .10)
nor emotional exhaustion on day T (γ = -0.026, s.e. = 0.093, p > .10) was related to emotional
exhaustion on day T+1. A possible explanation is that CSRs adopted a defensive posture and
withheld their investment of their full selves at work (decreased work engagement) to prevent
23
further resource loss (Hobfoll, 1988). In sum, our additional analyses provide further support to
our research model.
As mentioned earlier, we consider engaged employees as those who employ and express
their full selves at work (Kahn, 1990, 2010; Rich et al., 2010), and we assessed work
engagament following the more nuanced operationalization of engagement characterized by
vigor, dedication, and absorption proposed by Schaufelli and colleagues (2002). However, we
should note that even though our operationalization matches the conceptualization of engaged
employees, i.e., they are dedicated and absorbed while working, it contains a dimension – vigor –
that has been often argued to be the opposite of exhaustion (see Saks & Gruman, 2014).
Although the within-person correlation between emotional exhaustion and work engagement is
quite low (r = -0.13, p < .05), indicating they are distinct constructs, one may still raise the
question of whether the relationships that we hypothesized above could be explained by the
overlap between vigor and exhaustion. To address this possibilitiy, we tested our hypothesized
model without the two items measuring vigor (i.e., we only included dedication and absorption)
and the results were identical with our original findings. Importantly, the relationship between
emotional exhaustion (measured before bedtime) and next-day work engagement became
stronger (γ = -0.20, s.e. = 0.06, p < .01); and so did the indirect effect of surface acting on next-
day work engagement via emotional exhaustion (indirect effect = -0.06; 90% CI = -0.10, -0.02).
To be sure, we do not advocate that researchers should use this (narrower) measure instead of the
full UWES, as engagement must entail all three dimensions to reflect the holistic employment
and expression of one’s full self, and is distinct from exhaustion; nevertheless, we believe that
these additional analyses can serve as a robustness check for our findings.
DISCUSSION
24
In the present study, we found support for a within-individual model linking surface
acting (but not deep acting) to emotional exhaustion and further to next-day work engagement.
Importantly, we also found support for a moderating effect of giving help but not of receiving
help on the within-individual linkages. Our within-person moderated mediation model is
grounded in existing theory yet our theorizing that introduces the sense of self and the role of
autonomous activities in resource conservation (both depletion and restoration) is novel. Our
findings provide compelling evidence that surface acting is costly to the self (which is essential
for work engagement) and that only autonomous activities, such as giving help, can effectively
restore one’s sense of self.
In the following section, we clarify our study’s three areas of contribution and explain
how these contributions, taken together, advance and expand specific theory on emotional labor
and work engagement and, more broadly, COR theory.
Contributions to Theory and Research
First, the temporal separation among surface acting, emotional exhaustion, and work
engagement has meaningful and substantive value—inclusion of time lags is not just a
methodological consideration (i.e., minimizing common method bias) but represents a vital step
towards theoretical advancement (George & Jones, 2000; Mitchell & James, 2001). While our
findings are consistent with past studies that found a positive relationship between surface acting
and emotional exhaustion (Grandey, 2003; Pugh et al., 2011; Trougakos et al., 2015), we go
beyond past research by uncovering that the depleting effects of surface acting can spill over to
the following day’s work engagement. The fact that we found enduring carry-over effects of the
resource loss dynamic to the next day suggests that depleted individuals tend to withhold
investment of their entire selves at work. The temporal separation among our variables not only
25
offers a more conservative test, but also strongly suggests that the resource depleting effect of
emotional labor, particularly surface acting, is pervasive.
Our findings also extend and complement previous research that considered different
temporal lags and outcome variables, including Cote and Morgan’s (2002) two-wave study
among part-time student workers that found suppression of unpleasant emotions at Time 1
predicted job satisfaction and intentions to quit at Time 2 (i.e., four weeks later), Hülsheger and
colleagues’(2010) two-wave study among teachers that linked emotional labor in Time 1 with
strain and job performance two months later, and Wagner and colleagues’(2014) study among
bus drivers that underscored the harmful within-day, work-to-family spillover effects of surface
acting, leading to lower quality of interactions with family members and worse sleep quality. We
did not find any significant effect of deep acting (the effects of which we controlled in all our
analyses) on end-of-day emotional exhaustion (γ = -0.06, s.e. = 0.07, p > .10). Previous studies
also failed to find a significant relationship between deep acting and indicators of impaired well-
being (Hülsheger et al., 2010; Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011). In essence, these results offer
suggestive evidence for a theoretical explanation of why differential effects of surface and deep
acting on well-being have been observed in past research: because unlike surface acting, deep
acting involves an alignment between one’s true self with what is displayed (Grandey, 2003); as
such, deep acting does not diminish one’s sense of self (or diminishes it less than surface acting).
This reasoning is entirely consistent with our theorizing on the role of the self in whether
emotional labor depletes employees’ psychological resources.
Second, we contribute to the recovery literature which has predominantly focused on off-
work periods ranging from vacations to lunch breaks (Sonnentag, 2003; Trougakos & Hideg,
2009; Trougakos et al., 2014) and respond to the call for empirical studies on restorative
26
opportunities during work (Roberts et al., 2005; Spreitzer et al., 2005, 2011) by theorizing that
behaviors enacted at work can also be efficacious in recovering from resource loss. Past research
found that individuals who engage in respite activities during their breaks are able to replenish
their resources to better engage in positive affective displays later on (Trougakos et al., 2008).
Going beyond previous research, we considered the role of helping and being helped as potential
buffers in resource depletion processes at work.2 By concurrently capturing and comparing the
relative attenuating effects of at-work help giving and receiving on the linkages among daily
surface acting, emotional exhaustion, and work engagement, we provide suggestive evidence
supporting our theorizing that only autonomous activities such as giving help can restore
resources related to one’s sense of self that were depleted by behaviors that were not autonomous
(i.e., surface acting). This suggests a compelling theoretical explanation for why certain job
demands are more deleterious than others and also for why certain activities are more restorative
than others: because they have differential connections to resources related to the employee’s
sense of self.
Third, our finding that helping colleagues buffered the depleting effects of surface acting
highlights the resource replenishing effect of an at-work autonomous activity and complements
prior research that found lunch breaks to minimize fatigue only if employees engaged in
autonomous activities during their lunch break (Trougakos et al., 2014). In this study, we focused
on giving help and not on other autonomous actions because we can precisely have a parallel
comparison between giving and receiving help, hypothesizing that the differential extent to
which they involve autonomy drives their efficacy in buffering the deleterious effect of
emotional labor onto next day’s work engagement through the depletion of emotional resources.
2The majority of existing studies on helping coworkers regarded this dynamic either as an outcome or as a predictor,
but not as a moderator (Anand, Vidyarthi, Liden, & Rousseau, 2010; Chiaburu, Oh, Berry, Li, & Gardner, 2011;
Ilies et al., 2009; see Spitzmuller, van Dyne, & Ilies, 2010 for a comprehensive review).
27
Future research can also consider other factors that might function in a similar manner as help
giving (by promoting feelings of choice/autonomy) such as job crafting whereby the individual
employee proactively makes physical and cognitive changes on particular task and relational
work boundaries (Berg, Wrzesniewski, & Dutton, 2010; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).
Collectively, our broad contribution consists of our integration of the literature on
emotional labor with the proposal that externally imposed emotional display threatens the
employees’ sense of self and the conclusion that only self-initiated autonomous activities can
mitigate this process. We believe this contribution is important because it elucidates previous
differential findings with respect to the effects of surface and deep acting; it also links emotional
labor with work engagement and explains why these are linked. This contribution also suggests
that autonomous actions and activities are crucial to restoring resources connected to one’s sense
of self, and thus expands COR theory.
Implications for Future Research
We have thus far argued that helping colleagues is autonomous and self-determined;
however, a more recent stream of research on OCB (of which helping colleagues is one example)
has focused on compulsory OCB (Vigoda-Gadot, 2007) or OCB pressure (Bolino, Turnley,
Gilstrap, & Suazo, 2009) defined as a contextual demand whereby employees feel pressured to
perform citizenship behaviors due to informal reward systems or organizational norms. Notably,
past research showed that OCB pressure has psychological costs and negative implications to
employee well-being, including increased job stress and burnout (Bolino, Hsiung, Harvey, &
LePine, 2015; Vigoda-Gadot, 2007). In the context of our study, we theorize that helping
colleagues is less likely to be a case of OCB pressure, because if indeed it were, then helping
colleagues would reasonably worsen (instead of alleviate) the depleting effects of surface acting.
28
Moreover, the non-significant within-person (r = 0.03, ns) and between-person (r = -0.07, ns)
correlations between giving help and emotional exhaustion suggest that the likelihood of OCB
pressure is negligible. Taken together, given the target of the helping behavior (colleagues), the
context of our study (in-bound call center), and the level of analysis (within-person relationships
for all hypotheses), OCB pressure is not likely a major concern. Nonetheless, we encourage
future research to examine whether OCB pressure would weaken the buffering effect of daily
help giving by testing a cross-level three-way interaction among OCB pressure (a between-
person difference variable, see Bolino et al., 2015), daily surface acting and help giving.
Although our findings reveal that helping is beneficial, we acknowledge that there could
be a “dark side” to helping (Bergeron, 2007) depending on contextual and individual factors,
including the focal outcome variables examined. For example, Barnes and colleagues (2008)
found that backing-up behavior (a form of help giving) in teams can be harmful as backup
providers tend to neglect their own taskwork, and this is even more costly in situations where
workload distribution is uneven. Moreover, Koopman and colleagues (2016) found that helping
could stifle one’s perceived work-goal progress. While our study gives an affirming nod to the
advantages of helping, particularly in buffering the depleting effects of surface acting, a caveat is
warranted, as there could be a “too-much-of-a-good-thing” effect (Pierce & Aguinis, 2013)
where helping might be unfavorable when taken too far, and when potential tradeoffs could
happen if we consider different outcome variables. Future research can illuminate how to guard
against unfavorable consequences that could potentially emerge from spreading oneself too thin
or being treated as a pushover due to excessive helping (Grant, 2013).
Limitations and Strengths
29
Like any empirical study, ours has limitations that point to promising directions for future
research. First is our reliance on self-reports, which may raise the concern that common method
(specifically, rater) bias might explain the results. To address this, we collected supervisor
ratings of CSRs’ work effort after the five-day study. In particular, we asked the respective
supervisors to assess the CSR’s work effort in the past one week (i.e., the week when the study
was conducted) using the 5-item work effort scale developed by Brown and Leigh (1996).
Sample items include “When this employee worked, s/he really exerted her/himself to the fullest”
(coefficient alpha = 0.85). Supervisor-rated work effort positively correlated with each CSR’s
aggregate work engagement reports (r = 0.23, p < .05), giving us some confidence in the validity
of work engagement as the final outcome in our model. Future research may benefit from an
outcome from another source, such as customer satisfaction in the form of tips (e.g., Hülsheger,
Lang, Schewe, & Zijlstra, 2015). Importantly, in doing within-individual analyses, we have
eliminated the influence of personality or rating biases (and any other person-based biases).
Notably, our contribution concerns theorizing and testing the buffering effect of giving and
receiving help, and common method bias is not an issue in testing interactions; in fact it can even
make interactions more difficult to detect, which would make our results conservative (e.g.,
Evans, 1985; Siemsen, Roth, & Oliveira, 2010).
Second, we acknowledge that there could be other mediators of the buffering effect such
as positive affect that could potentially enrich our understanding of the resource depletion and
restoration mechanisms we proposed in our research model. Past research found within-
individual emotional labor strategies predicted subsequent affective states (Scott & Barnes,
2011). Moreover, helping behaviors tend to enhance positive affect (Alden & Trew, 2013;
Glomb, Bhave, Miner, & Wall, 2011; Koopman et al., 2016). While beyond the scope of our
30
current study, future research can extend our research model by including positive affect as an
immediate outcome of helping, offering a more comprehensive depiction of the resource
replenishment process. Scholars can consider using event-contingent experience sampling
method (Wheeler & Reis, 1991) to capture fluctuations in affective states brought about by
emotional labor during the customer interaction episodes, as well as affective states before and
after every helping episode to accommodate and test alternative models.
Lastly, our context may limit generalizability of our study findings. CSRs naturally
require more positive affective displays and suppression of negative emotions. Other occupations
involving high emotional labor such as bill collectors (Sutton, 1991), police officers (van
Gelderen, Heuven, van Veldhoven, Zeelenberg, & Croon, 2007), barristers (Harris, 2002), and
even professors (Bellas, 1999) have a different set of feeling rules and norms about the emotions
they have to express while performing their jobs. Future research can cross-validate our research
model with different occupations, contexts, and cultures (Grandey et al., 2005).
Practical Implications
In emphasizing the key message of Pfeffer’s (2010) article on the human factor in
building sustainable organizations, Fritz and colleagues noted that “if employees cannot sustain
their energy over long periods of time, organizations cannot expect them to achieve consistently
high-level performance” (2011: 30). Indeed, Zapf and colleagues (2003) emphasized that the
critical issue that adversely impacts CSRs’ well-being was not the nature of job demands in call
centers, but the low job resources available to them. The buffering effect of at-work helping
suggests that employees themselves can become active agents in shaping their work context that
could protect them against emotional exhaustion and enhance their work engagement, as they
“hold the keys to their own adaptive capabilities” (Spreitzer et al., 2005: 545).
31
The main practical implication of this research is simple, yet powerful and important.
Like breaks from work, respites, and other recovery strategies examined by past research,
helping coworkers is an active, employee-driven behavioral strategy that can buffer against
resource depletion processes associated with emotional labor, to the benefit of employees and
employers (i.e., resulting in less exhaustion and more work engagement). Unlike passive
resource replenishment strategies, helping coworkers has beneficial effects for customer
satisfaction and organizational performance over and above task performance associated with
positive emotional displays (e.g., Chuang & Liao, 2010; Susskind et al., 2003), thus benefiting
organizations in more than one way. Therefore, leaders and key decision makers in service
organizations should foster an organizational culture conducive to helping colleagues at work.
For instance, a charismatic leader could promote a stronger collective identity among followers
which could in turn encourage employees to help and support one another in the organization
(Conger, Kanungo, & Menon, 2000). Organizational leaders should also develop a climate of
trust and respect which are critical in fostering heedful relating whereby employees would be
more willing to cooperate and attend to their colleagues (Spreitzer et al., 2005). This is important
to consider as findings from past studies revealed that having an emotionally supportive work
climate could be instrumental in alleviating the negative impact of emotional labor on employee
well-being (Diefendorff, Erickson, Grandey, & Dahling, 2011; Duke et al., 2009; Grandey, Foo,
Groth, & Goodwin, 2012). Our findings indicate that such efforts would have positive
consequences for organizations beyond their already known effects (e.g., the relationship
between helping behavior and organizational effectiveness, Podsakoff & MacKenzie, 1997) by
achieving a high level of customer satisfaction while at the same time protecting employee well-
being.
32
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TABLE 1
Means, Standard Deviations (SD), Percentages of Within-person Variance and Correlations among Study Variables
Variables M
Between
-person
SD
Within
-person
SD
Within-
person
variance
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 PA before Work 2.94 0.94 0.50 22% (.91) -.03 .06 .24* .76** .22* .37* -.15
2 NA before Work 1.47 0.51 0.39 37% -.12 (.80) .29** .26** -.19 .04 -.01 .46**
3 Surface Acting 2.48 0.74 0.53 34% -.08 .13* (.85) .51** -.13 .06 .03 .30**
4 Deep Acting 2.75 0.78 0.59 37% .08 .06 .14
(.84) .24* .23* .18 .21*
5 Work Engagement 3.28 0.68 0.48 33% .34** -.08 -.22** .07 (.82) .38** .42** -.17
6 Giving Help 2.91 0.79 0.44 23% .14* .07 .04 .09 .18** (.90) .41** -.07
7 Receiving Help 3.13 0.84 0.61 35% .15* .01 -.06 .05 .18** .27** (.88) .02
8 Emotional Exhaustion 2.55 0.99 0.79 39% -.05 .11 .19** -.02 -.13* .03 .00 (.90)
Notes: The correlations above the diagonal represent between-person correlations (computed using individuals’ aggregated scores; N
= 102). The correlations below the diagonal represent within-person correlations (N = 486). Reliabilities were averaged across days
and reported on the diagonal in bold. PA = positive affect; NA = negative affect.
*p < .05
**p < .01 (two-tailed)
43
TABLE 2
Results of Mediation Test and Moderated Mediation Test
Mediation Test
(H1a, 1b, & 1c)
Moderated Mediation Test
(H2a & H2b)
b s.e. t b s.e. t
Predicting emotional exhaustion
Before-work positive affect -.03 .08 -.34 -.03 .08 -.38
Before-work negative affect .16 .14 1.20 .16 .15 1.08
Deep acting -.06 .07 -.83 -.07 .07 -.89
Surface acting .28** .08 3.37 .28** .08 3.34
Giving help .03 .10 .30
Receiving help .01 .07 .18
Surface acting x Giving help -.36* .16 -2.20
Surface acting x Receiving help .14 .10 1.41
Predicting next-day work engagement
Work engagement .05 .09 .60 .05 .09 .52
Surface acting .09 .06 1.52 .02 .07 .32
Giving help -.02 .09 -.22
Receiving help -.06 .06 -.90
Surface acting x Giving help .25 .22 1.14
Surface acting x Receiving help .17 .13 1.26
Emotional exhaustion -.14** .05 -2.87 -.13** .05 -2.67
Note. N = 243-486, sample size is smaller for lagged analyses.
s.e. = standard error;
*p < .05
**p < .01 (two-tailed)
44
FIGURE 1
Hypothesized Research Model and Results
Note: For parsimony, control variables are not included in this figure.
-.13**
.14
.28**
Surface Acting
(Day T)
End-of-day
Emotional Exhaustion
(Day T)
Next-day
Work Engagement
(
Da
y
T+1
)
Giving Help
(Day T)
Receiving Help
(Day T)
-.36*
45
FIGURE 2
Interaction between Surface Acting and At-work Giving Help on End-of-day Emotional Exhaustion
46
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Marilyn A. Uy (muy@ntu.edu.sg) is an assistant professor in the Division of Strategy,
Management and Organisation at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She
received her Ph.D. from the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Her research focuses on work motivation, stress and coping, well-being, and psychological
processes in entrepreneurship.
Katrina Jia Lin (jia.lin@u.nus.edu) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Management
and Organisation at the School of Business at the National University of Singapore. Her research
interests include interpersonal interactions, work-family issues, and well-being.
Remus Ilies (ilies@nus.edu.sg) is Provost’s Chair and professor of management and
organisation at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on topics such as
employee stress and well-being, work-family processes, and leadership and motivation, with a
particular interest in understanding the role of emotional processes in explaining outcomes
relevant to these research topics. His research has been published in premier scholarly journals.
He received numerous awards from organizations such as the Academy of Management and the
Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
