How Emotional Labor and Ethical Leadership Affect Job Engagement for Chinese Public Servants

Abstract

Responsiveness is important in public-service delivery. This study explores three elements that contribute to responsiveness—emotional labor, job engagement, and ethical leadership. Three findings emerge: First, in terms of workers and their expression of work-related emotion, authentic emotive expression relates positively with job engagement while pretending to feel the emotion being displayed has a negative relationship. Second, ethical leadership moderates the relationship between pretending and job engagement, in that higher levels of ethical leadership lessen the negative influence of pretense in emotive expression. This means that when employees must mask how they feel, ethical leadership compensates for the deleterious effect of expressing an emotion other than what one is feeling. This, in turn, helps to prevent decreased job engagement. Third, ethical leadership does not affect the relationship between authentic emotive expression and job engagement. The sample surveyed are government employees in China.

Emotional labour and work engagement among nurses: examining perceived compassion, leadership and work ethic as stress buffers

“…The first hypothesis, predicting that higher EL is related to lower WE was supported (for similar findings, see Lu & Guy , Schreurs et al . ).…”

“…, Pugh et al . , Lu & Guy ). These coping resources include various individual factors such as appropriate emotion regulation strategies (Gross ,b, Bechtoldt et al .…”

“…) and contextual resources, e.g. supportive leadership (Hunt , Lu & Guy ). Such a salutary perspective has its foundations in stress buffer theory, proposing that stressors do not inevitably harm an employee's well‐being and health if an individual has certain buffering resources as coping assets (Cohen & Wills ).…”

“…Despite the increasing interest in WE, a possible linkage between EL and WE, which we focus on, has been seldom explored. Nevertheless, a few recent studies indicate that EL is related to lower WE (Lu & Guy , Schreurs et al . ) – also among nurses (Bechtoldt et al .…”

“…However, some other similar (supportive, inspiring, sensitive, ethical) leadership styles have been found to buffer against EL. For instance, Lu and Guy () reported that ethical leadership ameliorated the relationship between EL and WE. Moreover, Chen et al .…”