Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the emotional labor of service employees affects customer service misbehavior and repurchase intention and to explore the mechanism and boundary conditions.
Methods: We collected a total of 252 pairs of employee–customer valid matching data and used SPSS 24.0 and Mplus7.0 statistical analysis tools to perform statistical analysis and hypothesis testing.
Results: The results showed that employees’ surface acting has a significant positive impact on customer misbehavior and negative impact on repurchase intention via perceived face threat, while deep acting has a significant negative impact on customer misbehavior and positive impact on repurchase intention via perceived face threat. And customer face threat sensitivity not only moderates the relationship between service employee emotional labor and customer perceived face threat but also moderates the indirect effect of surface acting on customer misbehavior and repurchase intention via customer perceived face threat.
Conclusion: Based on face theory, this study explained how and when emotional labor of service employees may affect customer service misbehavior and repurchase intention. These results contribute to the emotional labor and customer service misbehavior literature by introducing perceived face threat as an underlying mechanism and face threat sensitivity as a boundary condition. In addition, this study suggests that service-oriented enterprises should pay attention to the management and guidance of employees’ emotional labor and try their best to let employees show deep acting rather than surface acting.
Keywords: emotional labor, customer perceived face threat, face threat sensitivity, customer misbehavior, repurchase intention