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Regulating emotions to comply with organisational standards has become a crucial part of today’s business as customer-oriented service is continuing to evolve. The way employees regulate their emotions at work will affect their own as well as the organisation’s performance. Previous studies found that emotion regulations had an impact on employees’ job security, pay, and also customer satisfaction and retention. Moreover, different types of emotional labour strategies adopted by workers would generate different effects on their turnover decisions and organisation’s turnover rate eventually. Emotional labour is a process of modifying emotional expressions by suppressing, enhancing, or faking emotions in order to conform to the emotional display rules required by the organisation or the job itself. There are two widely-recognised types of emotional labour strategies, which are deep acting and surface acting. Surface acting is taken place where a person regulates only his or her facial expressions, whereas deep acting means a person intentionally modifies the feelings in order to display the required emotion for their jobs.

Taking the crucial roles of emotional labour strategies for organisations and employees’ well-being into consideration, it is therefore essential to identify individual and organisational factors that might be associated with the strategies adopted by the workers. This study aims to discover whether workers’ affectivity, perception of workplace social support, and collectivism would predict their adoption of deep acting or surface acting strategy. This research looks at dispositional affectivity, perceived workplace social support, and collectivism as predictors for emotional labour using a diary study. A number of 96 service workers participated in this study, where 36 of them were Indonesian and the other 60 participants were Greek. This study adopted the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE), the Scale of Perceived Supervisor, Organisational, and Co-worker Support, and also the Collectivism dimension of The Cultural Values Scale (CVS) as the measurement tools for the general questionnaire. A questionnaire with open-ended questions was then used to record respondents’ emotional labour strategies on a daily basis in 1 (one) week, where the responses were later coded into surface acting, deep acting, or other strategies.

As expected, results revealed that workers’ positive affect significantly predicted the use of deep acting strategy during interactions with customers. This was in line with previous findings stated that people with positive affect tend to be more alert, enthusiastic, and excited, allowing them to engage in deep acting more effortlessly. However, there was no evidence to conclude that respondents’ negative affect significantly predicted the use of surface acting. With regard to perceived organisational support, it was found that it significantly predicted the adoption of surface acting, but showed no relationship with deep acting. Similarly, there was no evident relationship between both worker’s perceived supervisor and co-worker support and the use of either deep or surface acting strategy. The examination of the last predictor, which was collectivism, showed that it significantly predicted the adoption of deep acting strategy. This was also supported by the findings from previous research stated that regulating emotions might be a normative process in collectivist cultures, making it more likely for people to engage in deep acting. This study has shed some light on how personal and contextual factors might influence the adoption of particular emotion regulation strategy for service workers in dealing with customers. However, further research is needed to allow the findings to be applicable in a wider context.