Service organizations encourage employees to express positive emotions in service encounters, in the hope that customers “catch” these emotions and react positively. Yet customer and employee emotions could be mutually influential. To understand emotional exchanges in service encounters and their influences on customer outcomes, the current study models the interplay of emotional contagion and emotional labor, as well as their influence on customer satisfaction. Employees might catch customers’ emotions and transmit those emotions back to customers through emotional contagion, and employee emotional labor likely influences this cycle by modifying the extent to which emotional contagion occurs. Data from 268 customer-employee dyads, gathered from a large chain of foot massage parlors, confirm the existence of an emotion cycle. Deep acting, as one type of emotional labor used by employees, hinders the transmission of negative emotions to customers, whereas surface acting facilitates it. Both customer emotions and employee emotional labor thus have critical influences on service encounters. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the potential influence of customer preservice emotions and the presence of an emotion cycle during service delivery.

Using the work–home resources (W‐HR) model as an overarching framework, our study seeks to examine the interplay between employees’ provision and receipt of interpersonal organizational citizenship behaviours (OCB‐I; i.e. helping behaviours), and its spillover effects on two family outcomes (family performance and marital withdrawal behaviours). Further, we simultaneously test resource depletion (emotional exhaustion) and resource generation (personal accomplishment) mechanisms linking OCB‐Is and the family domain. Based on a time‐lagged, dual‐source study of 320 employees, we found that OCB‐I enactment is positively related to both exhaustion (only for those who receive low OCB‐Is from colleagues) and personal accomplishment at work (regardless of OCB‐I receipt), which interferes with and enriches employees’ family lives, respectively. We discuss the theoretical contributions of these findings to OCB research and the W‐HR model. Practitioner Points Employees should realize that offering help at work can both enrich and hinder family life. Organizations could cultivate a culture of support and reciprocity to dampen the effect of helping at work on exhaustion and the ensuing negative consequences for family functioning.

This study examines the effects of the congruence and incongruence between employee actual and customer perceived emotional labor on customer trust. Based on data collected from 510 service employee and customer dyads in restaurants, the results of response surface modeling indicate that customer trust is higher when employee deep acting and customer perceived deep acting are both high rather than both low. Customer trust is also higher when customer perceived deep acting is higher than employee actual deep acting rather than vice versa. The effects are different in surface acting: as employee surface acting and customer perceived surface acting increase, customer trust initially decreases, then increases, exhibiting a U‐shaped effect. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

Summary Drawing upon theory and research on affect transference and proactive personality, we examine the proactive behaviors employees enact to limit the reciprocal transference of negative affect between customers and employees during service encounters. Results of two event‐based, multi‐source field studies in the service industry show that employee proactive personality weakens (a) the positive relationship between customer negative affect before the service encounter and employee negative affect during the service encounter and (b) the negative relationship between employee negative affect during the service encounter and customer ratings of service quality after the service encounter. Employee information exchange with the customer mediates these moderating effects. These findings highlight the potential for employee proactive personality and information exchange with customers in limiting the transfer of negative affect in service encounters and minimizing negative further downstream effects on customers' perceptions of service quality.