콜센터에서 감정표현규범에 따른 상담사의 감정노동이 감정부조화, 감정소진, 이직의도에 미치는 영향

This study focuses on the emotional labor of customer service representatives (CSRs) working for call centers. Customers express their anger, hostility and insult easily to invisible CSRs. CSRs have become an easy target of unsatisfactory customers. Nevertheless, CSRs must control their emotions according to the emotional display rules required by the call center and perform emotional labor responding to the customers with emotion required by the organization. Although CSRs are the representative emotional laborers, practitioners and researchers' interest in CSRs' emotional labor is not high. In this sense, this study attempts to examine how emotional display rules provided by the call center influence CSRs’ emotional labor, which in turn leads to negative outcomes. More specifically, this study explains the process that emotional labor increases emotional dissonance and exhaustion and thus leads to increased turnover intention. In fact, CSRs are likely to experience emotional dissonance due to the gap between controlled emotion for customers as required by the organization and their real emotion and thereby experiencing serious emotional exhaustion. Such job stress may cause CSRs to leave the call center. Thus, this study suggests that the emotional display rule designed for enhancing service quality and customer satisfaction can function as a major cause of increasing CSRs’ job stress. To test the proposed research model and hypotheses, we used a total of 204 data collected on CSRs working for call centers. The major findings are as follows. Frist, the results show that emotional display rules increase surface acting and deep acting. Second, the results indicate that surface acting increases emotional dissonance and emotional exhaustion whereas deep acting decreases them. Third, our results demonstrate that emotional dissonance has nothing to do with turnover intention, but it increases emotional exhaustion. Finally, turnover intention is determined by emotional exhaustion. Discussion and implications of the results are presented.