Impact of Emotional Dissonance on Work Stress: Study of Frontline Employees in Service Industries

Abstract

There is a major global shift in economies which makes the service sector to emerge than ever before. In a competitive service economy, frontline employees have to play a crucial role in leading businesses to success by satisfying all the customers. Hence, organizations impose different rules to display emotions to which its employees are expected to adhere. Every employee doesn’t feel the same and they are not in the same emotion when they work. Sometimes organizational expectations (display rules) and emotional status of employees at the moment tend to clash, that leads to emotional dissonance which is a major cause of work stress, which has been identified as a research gap in the extant literature to investigate further. Hence, bridging the lacuna in research, the current study was initiated with the purpose of assessing the impact of emotional dissonance on work stress of frontline employees of service sector organizations in Sri Lanka. Current study is a cross-industry descriptive research in which a standard questionnaire was used to collect primary data through an off-line questionnire survey. Standard measurement scales were used to assess the constructs in the conceptual framwork. This is a quantitativeexplanatory research for which primary data were collected from a sample of 141 frontline employees working in service sector organizations selected at the convenience of the researchers. Collected data were analyzed with the aid of SPSS by employing correlation and the regression analysis. A significant positive association was found between emotional dissonance and work stress. Moreover, findings revealed a significant positive impact of emotional dissonance on work stress of frontline employees. Thus, it could be recommended that, the service sector organizations should focus on building deep acting skills within employees because that is the sustainable solution for employee stress cause by emotional dissonance. Further, as short term solutions organizations can give recognition for the work they are doing, praise them and reward them financially and non-financially.