UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business HA THI TRUC MAI EMOTIONAL LABOR, EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND QUALITY OF LIFE A RESEARCH ON SERVICE EMPLOYEES MASTER OF BUSINESS (H[.]
UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business HA THI TRUC MAI EMOTIONAL LABOR, EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND QUALITY OF LIFE: A RESEARCH ON SERVICE EMPLOYEES MASTER OF BUSINESS (HONOURS) Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2018 UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business HA THI TRUC MAI EMOTIONAL LABOR, EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND QUALITY OF LIFE: A RESEARCH ON SERVICE EMPLOYEES MASTER OF BUSINESS (HONOURS) SUPERVISOR: DR NGUYEN THI MAI TRANG Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2018 Table of Contents List of acronyms List of figure List of table Acknowledgement Abstract Introduction Theoretical background and Hypothesis development 11 Emotional labor 11 Employee engagement 13 Emotional labor and employee engagement 14 Employee engagement and quality of life 16 Moderating effects of work life balance perception 18 Moderating effects of customer orientation 20 Methodology 22 Procedure and sample 22 Pilot study 23 Main survey 24 Measurement 25 Data analysis and results 26 Sample profile 26 Cronbach’s alpha results 27 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) results 28 Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) results 28 Hypothesis Testing Results 31 Moderating Testing Results 32 Discussion 34 Implications 35 Theoretical implications 35 Managerial implication 36 Limitation and direction for future research 38 Conclusion 39 References 40 Appendix 1: Guideline for Pilot study (qualitative in-depth interview) 46 Appendix 2: Vietnamese questionnaire 49 Appedix 3: Descriptive statistic of sample 51 Appendix 4: The results of Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of reliability 54 Appendix EFA Results 58 Appendix CFA results for model 60 Appendix 7: Structural results for model 65 Appendix 8: Moderating testing results 68 Appendix 9: The answer of interviewing 10 people for the insignificant moderating role of work life balance perception 71 List of acronyms - HCM: Ho Chi Minh - EFA: Exploratory Factor Analysis - CFA: Confirmatory Factor Analysis - AVE: Average variance extracted - SA: Surface acting - DA: Deep acting - EE: Employee engagement - VI: Vigor - DE: Dedication - AB: Absorption - QL: Quality of life - WL: Work life balance perception - CO: Customer orientation List of figure Figure 1: Conceptual Model………………… 22 Figure 2: Research procedure……………………………………………………………23 Figure 3: Structural results (standadized estimates)…………………………………… 32 List of table Table 1: EFA results 29 Table 2: Standardized CFA Loadings of item 30 Table 3: Correlation results 31 Table 4: Results from the structural model………………………………………………32 Table 5: Moderator results……………………………… .33 Acknowledgement Firstly, I would like to thank all respondents who helped me finishing questionnaires Specially, I would like to thank my supervisor Mrs Nguyen Thi Mai Trang for her guidance and strong support that help me continue to write and research even during the most stressful moments Secondly, I would like to thank all teachers who taught me in International school of Business (ISB) during whole course I have got a lot of knowledge not only useful for my thesis but also for my work and continuous studying Thirdly, I would like to thank the thesis defense committee: Dr Tran Ha Minh Quan, Dr Nguyen Phong Nguyen for asking questions and advising to give positive arguments and constructive contribution for my thesis Besides, I would like to send my thankful to my MBUS family, my classmates and my friends gave me good conditions and generous support for completion my thesis Especially, I would like to thanks Ho Tan Vuong, who is not only my MBUS classmate but also my husband for giving me strong support, advising on the thesis and SPSS data analyzing Finally, I would like to send thanks to my family for creating good condition to complete this thesis Thank you very much for always supporting, encouraging me and standing by my side no matter the circumstances Abstract This study investigates the impact of emotional labor including deep acting and surface acting on employee engagement It also examines the effect of employee engagement to quality of life of service employees in Vietnam Moreover, the moderator role of customer orientation and work life balance perception on the relationship between deep acting, surface acting and employee engagement is also tested in this study A structural equation model is applied and tested using data survey from a sample of 278 service employees in Ho Chi Minh City The results reveal that surface acting positively impacts on employee engagement whereas deep acting negatively impacts on employee engagement In addition, employee engagement positively effects on quality of life Furthermore, the moderating role of customer orientation to the relationship between surface acting and employee engagement is supported whereas deep acting is not significant Nevertheless, the moderating role of work life balance perception is not supported in this study Based on these findings, this study proposes some realistic tactics for management to have suitable strategy to improve employee engagement and employee quality of life through emotional labor and customer orientation Introduction During the past several years, although emotions have been an interest topic for sociologists and psychologists (Hochschild, 1983), increasing organizational scholars have focused on the topic of emotion display in organizations (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993) According to Sutton (1991), the relationship between emotional expression and employee effectiveness has been conducted in many theoretical and empirical researches Moreover, increasing competition in the continuous growth service industry has forced organizations to put higher attention on service quality providing to customers (Bowen & Schneider, 1995) Bowen and Schneider (1988) also identified that the direct interaction between customers and employees is the main factor that affect to the perceived quality of service As a results, managers have had concern about “the images employees create for customers and the quality of interactions between employees and customers” (Morris and Feldman, 1996, p.986) Following the requirement of organization, service employees can either display fake and inauthentic emotions, pretend, put a mas (surface acting) or make efforts to adjust internal feeling to display sincere emotions (deep acting), that perceived as emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983) Generally, emotional labor is presented as the act to express required emotions of organization during service transactions (Morris & Feldman, 1996) Diefendorff, Croyle, and Gosserand (2005) indicated that personality variables, emotional expressivity, emotional display rules, frequency, routineness, duration, organizational characteristics, job characteristics (Morris & Feldman, 1996) that are considered the Moderating effects of customer orientation Customer orientation is presented as enduring behaviors and attitudes of employees that are indicative of passionate concern towards demands, wants and needs of customers (Zablah, Franke, Brown, & Bartholomew, 2012) There are two level of customer orientation have been researched including corporate-level and individual-level At the organization level, according to Kam Sing Wong and Tong (2012), corporate-level customer orientation is determined as a culture, an active organization process that “drives an organization to continuously identify and meet their customer needs to gain sufficient knowledge to generate superior value to its customers” (p.103) At the individual-level, Donavan, Brown, and Mowen (2004) founded that personality traits influences customer orientation and in turn, influences the performance of employees More recently, many researchers have conceptualized customer orientation as a state-like psychological variable They have demonstrated that customer orientation is connected with a number of important individual-level consequences such as service employee overall performance, satisfaction, employee commitment (Donavan et al., 2004), and the customer-orientated behaviors performance (Stock & Hoyer, 2005) In this research, customer orientation is presented as a personality trait that is described as the predisposition or tendency of employee to achieve customer requirements in the service context According to Anaza, Nowlin, and Wu (2016), employee with high customer orientation has the ability to read, understand the customer need, enjoy solving customer problem and lower instances of exhibiting fake behavior toward customers Applied the fit theory (O'Reilly III, Chatman, & Caldwell, 1991), the employee behavior will be affected by 20 interaction between individual and the conditions or environment (Stock & Hoyer, 2005), so the worker performance will be increased when the individual characteristics match the demands of the job (Donavan et al., 2004) As a results, the service employees with high customer orientation will interest in their daily interaction with customers then lead to good working behavior as well as well performance Hartline and Ferrell (1996) defined that good customer orientation employees can modify their feelings in demanding service interaction and achieve satisfaction from their job (Hogan, Hogan, & Busch, 1984) In contrast, employee with low customer orientation will have less personal resources to deal with the service job demands, so they show insincere emotions, emotional dissonance then results in emotional stress, conflict, emotional exhaustion and reducing job satisfaction (Grandey, 2000) Previous researches studies about the outcome of customer orientation including emotional labor, performance, customer retention, the mediate role between emotional labor and employee engagement (Cross, Brashear, Rigdon, & Bellenger, 2007), fewer researches investigate the moderating of customer orientation between emotional labor and employee engagement, especially in Vietnam context As a result, the following hypotheses are proposed: H5a: The relationship between surface acting and employee engagement is moderated by customer orientation H5b: The relationship between deep acting and employee engagement is moderated by customer orientation 21 Customer Orientation Emotional labor H5a Surface Acting H1 H5b H3 Employee Engagement H2 Quality of Life Deep Acting H4b H4a Work life balance perception Figure 1: Conceptual Model Methodology Procedure and sample The research was conducted in Ho Chi Minh City Respondents were service employees who are working for bank, logistic company, insurance company, and customer services working in manufacturing company This study would be implemented through the combination of qualitative and quantitative researches, which research procedures were presented as below chart: Questionnaire design: Research objectives Literature review Draft questionnaire Revised measurements Final Questionnaire Pilot survey (Qualitative research) In-depth interview with 18 respondents 22 Main survey (Quantitative research) and data analysis A survey of 278 respondents questionnaires SEM Reliability analysis EFA CFA EFA Figure 2: Research procedure Pilot study The pilot study was undertaken as in-depth interviews with total 18 respondents including bank clears working in Sacombank, credit officer working in Vietcombank, sales man working in AIA insurance, sales and customer service employees working in Avery Dennison, sales manager working in New Star Logistic company and sales manager working in UPM company Previously, also in Vietnam context, theoretical sampling of the quality of life construct was employed in this step with marketers and the saturated point was 18 (Nguyen & Nguyen, 2012) This is an important step to make the measures of constructs appropriate for the context of this study although most of them were available in the literature During the pilot study, although the respondents could understand the questionnaire, there were some noticeable contributions and feedbacks from respondents to make the improvement for the final questionnaire (see Appendix 1) 23 Main survey The main survey was conducted by questionnaires with a convenience sample The aim of main survey was to assess the scales and test the models According to Hair, Black, Babin, and Anderson (2010), the sample size should be 100 or greater and the minimum sample is five times per each scale as general rules In this study, the research model consisted of 31 scales so the minimum sample size should be at least 155 observations In order to obtain the sample size requirement, an online questionnaire was composed in Google docs and then the link was sent to respondents through Zalo, Viber, Facebook, Linkedin The author also sent the link by email to colleges, friends and customers working as sales, customer services and bank clerks There were screening questions in the first part of the questionnaire emphasizing that this questionnaire is interviewing service employees who contact with customers directly only Totally, 201 questionnaires received from online channel, but there were 12 respondents that working as technician, construction and IT that did not satisfy the target respondent requirement and stopped from the screening questions Besides, the author also utilized face to face interviews with 15 customer service executive working in Avery Dennison company Moreover, the author printed the questionnaires and got support from friends who are sales manager of New Start Logistic company, sales manager of UPM company, credit officer working in Vietcombank and Sacombank, sales man working in AIA Insurance company for distributing the questionnaire directly to their colleges The author sent totally 85 printed questionnaires and received back 80 qualified questionnaires There were small gifts for respondents who helped to answer printed 24 questionnaire Among 284 received questionnaires, the author deleted answer that have the same level for 31 questions In summary, the usable data of this study was 278 observations It was suitable with the requirement of minimum sample size for doing standard multiple regression analysis The aim of this main survey, of course, was to validate the measures and to test the structural model Cronbach’s alpha reliability and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) were utilized to preliminarily assess the scales Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was employed to validate the measures and structural equation modeling (SEM) were applied to test the theoretical model and hypotheses Measurement Six constructs were examined including surface acting, deep acting, employee engagement, quality of life, customer orientation and work life balance perception Emotional labor including deep acting and surface acting was originally measured by 11 items adopted from Diefendorff et al (2005) However, surface acting items were deleted from pilot study Finally, in main survey, the surface acting scale consisted of items that focused on the required emotions was displayed without changing inside feelings In addition, after conducting the in depth interview, respondents recommend that SA2 (I fake a good mood when interacting with customers) and SA4 (I put on a “mask” in order to display the emotions I need for the job) should be reversed to positive meaning in order to receive objective answers Consequently, SA2 and SA4 were reversed code that high scores on the indexes reflect low surface acting The deep acting scale including items and focus on how individual perform their work by adjusts inside feeling 25 Employee engagement was a second-order construct comprising of three components: vigor, dedication and absorption The construct was developed on the basis of the scale used by Schaufeli and Bakker (2004) Originally, vigor consisted of items, dedication consisted of items and absorption consisted of items However, after the pilot study, vigor was measured by items, dedication was measured by items and absorption was measured by items Quality of life was measured by items, adopted from Peterson et al (2010) and work life balance perception was measured by items, adopted from Parkes and Langford (2008) Customer orientation was measured by items, adopted from Anaza et al (2016) All items were seven-point Likert scales, ranging from (1) “strongly disagree” to (7) “strongly agree” The questionnaire was originally prepared in English However, because English is not well understood in Vietnam, the questionnaire was translated into Vietnamese by an English teacher who is fluent in both languages After that, this teacher helped to undertake back translation to ensure the equivalence of meanings between the translation and the initial version Data analysis and results Sample profile The total of 278 usable questionnaires were obtained from service employees in Ho Chi Minh City The respondents were widely diverse by different gender, age, position, income, marital status, working time and field of working Almost the value of kurtoses and skewnesses were between the range of [-2, +2], which revealed that the acceptance of normal univariate distribution (George & Mallery, 2003) (See Appendix 3) 26 In 278 feedbacks, 42.4% was male and 57.6% was female In term of age, the majority was from 25 to 35 (66.2%), the age under 25 made up 28.4% and the smallest was 5.4% of employee over 35 years old Regarding to the respondent position, the main was staff (63.7%), 24.1% was supervisor and 12.2% was manager In term of income, 48.2% respondents with the monthly income from 10-20 million, 30.6% employee with the monthly income under 10 million, 18% from 20-30 million and 3.2% over 30 million About the working time at current company, the majority was from years – years (total 41%), 30.9% employees working from months-2 years, 16% employees working under months and 11.9% working over years, Although the surveys were conducted in a wide range of service industries, the main sectors were banks (34.9%), logistic (33.5%), insurance (13.3%), the rest are customer service and sales from manufacturing company, restaurant, hotel (18.3%) Finally, 59.4% respondents were single and 39.9% respondents got married in this survey Cronbach’s alpha results Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of reliability test and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) were used to preliminarily assess the scales According to Leech, Barrett, and Morgan (2013), Cronbach’s alpha should be over 0.7 and item with item-correlation less than 0.3 should be removed In this study, the Cronbach’s alpha results of these scales were greater than 0.70 including 0.775 (deep acting), 0.762 (surface acting), 0.778 (vigor), 0.812 (dedication), 0.810 (absorption), 0.775 (quality of life), 0.747 (work life balance perception), 0.878 (customer orientation), satisfying internal consistency requirement Note that one item measuring deep acting (I try to actually experience the emotions that I 27 must show to customers), one item measuring surface acting (I fake a good mood when interacting with customers) and one item measuring (When I get up in the morning, I feel like going to work) were removed due to their low item-total correlation (.50) and Sig of Bartlett’s Test was 0.000 (< 0.05) satisfying the test requirement In addition, EFA (principle axis factoring with Promax rotation) extracted six factors, corresponding with the six constructs mentioned in the theoretical model Besides, all factor loadings were higher than 0.50 and total variance extracted was higher than 50% (55.04%); absorption (eigen-value = 5.678); dedication (eigen-value = 1.963); deep acting (eigen-value = 1.783); quality of life (eigen-value = 1.562); surface acting (eigen-value = 1.458); vigor (eigen-value = 1.173) In sum, the EFA results showed that the requirement was satisfied by all scales The EFA analysis result was presented as below Table Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) results Prior to conducting structural equation modeling (SEM), the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) approach with the maximum likelihood estimation method was utilized to assess the quality of the measures The CFA results revealed that the measurement models of these constructs received an acceptance fit to the data: Chisquare/df = 1.577 (p = 0.000); GFI = 0.921; CFI = 0.952, RMSEA = 046 and the factor loadings of all items were high and substantial (greater than 0.5) and all significant (p0.9) and RMSEA = 045 (0.05) Thus, H4a is not supported Finally, the moderating effect of work life balance perception on the link between deep acting and employee engagement is not significant (β=0.040, p>0.05) So H4b is not supported 33 Discussion Realizing the emotional labor role in the employee engagement and quality of life for service employee, this study tests the impacts of emotional labor on employee engagement, and subsequently, on quality of life of service employees in Vietnam Moreover, in order to expand the scope of previous studies, the moderator role of customer orientation and work life balance perception in the relationship among emotional labor and engagement was investigated As SEM results, all of the three main hypotheses were statistically significant based on a data-set collected from 278 service employees in Ho Chi Minh The results is consistent with findings in previous researches, Firstly, the impacts of surface acting negatively effects on engagement, whereas deep acting is positively effects on employee engagement that consistent with the findings of Joo and Lee (2017); Yoo and Jeong (2017) This results suggest that surface acting performance would have a negative impact on work whereas true feeling can enhance engagement and work efficiency Secondly, this study found that employee engagement has positive relationship with quality of life that consistent with the finding of Matthews et al (2014) Consequently, employee engagement can enhance quality of life or subjective well-being in the workplace as well as in social life by positive affective spillover (Culbertson et al., 2012) In addition, the current study indicates that the relation between surface acting and employee engagement is moderated by customer orientation The findings enhance our knowledge that customer orientation declines the reducing effect of surface acting on employee engagement However, customer orientation does not show a moderating effect 34 6670102 ... Hofmann and Stokburger-Sauer (2017), emotional labor and work -life balance has remarkable impact in hospitality research and practice Previous studies typically focus on emotional labor as an... variance extracted - SA: Surface acting - DA: Deep acting - EE: Employee engagement - VI: Vigor - DE: Dedication - AB: Absorption - QL: Quality of life - WL: Work life balance perception - CO:... the employee engagement and quality of life for service employee, this study tests the impacts of emotional labor on employee engagement, and subsequently, on quality of life of service employees