한국생산성학회

This paper addresses whether both protection institutions for emotional laborers and their personal response can play a moderating role in the relationship between emotional labor and emotional exhaustion (and turnover intention). Theoretically, protection institutions for emotional laborers are considered as an job resources thus, we hypothesized that the more positively emotional laborers evaluate the protection system, the less negative the impact of emotional labor. We tested both whether emotional labor increases emotional exhaustion and turnover intentions among retail workers, and whether positive perceptions of protection systems have a buffering effect that reduces this increase. We found that emotional labor directly affects turnover intention and also indirectly enhances turnover intention by increasing emotional exhaustion. And in the relationship between emotional labor and turnover intention, protection institutions for emotional laborers exert a decreasing interaction effect. Furthermore, we found a three-way interaction effect whereby emotional labor increases emotional turnover intention, but a positive evaluation of protection systems reduces the increase, and this buffering effect is significantly larger for stronger personal response.