Frontline employees' passion and emotional exhaustion: The mediating role of emotional labor strategies

The study aims to apply a dualistic model of passion to explore how frontline employees with different types of passion for work use emotional labor strategies, and how this affects emotional exhaustion. The research surveyed samples of 260 in the restaurant industry and employed Structural Equation Model for analysis and testing. The results show that harmoniously passionate frontline employees tend to adopt a deep acting strategy when confronted with emotional labor, and then protect themselves from emotional exhaustion, whereas frontline employees with obsessive passion tend to employ a surface acting strategy, and are in turn more likely to exhausting their emotional energy. Further, finding of mediation analysis confirms the partially mediating role of emotional labor strategies in the relationship between dualistic passion for work and emotional exhaustion. Finally, this study proposes managerial implications and suggestions for future research.