EMOTIONAL DEMANDS-ABILITIES (ED-A) FIT, EMOTIONAL LABOR, AND RESOURCE DEPLETION

Abstract

Perceived emotional demands-abilities (ED-A) fit, defined as a perception of the congruence or fit between emotional demands of a job and abilities to fulfill these demands (Diefendorff, Greguras, & Fleenor, 2016), has been recently introduced to the area of management research. The main goal of this study is to test how a service employee’s psychological ownership of a job (POJ) predicts his or her ED-A fit and whether/how ED-A fit is related to emotional labor and depletion. I also look into the underlying mechanism by testing the mediation effect of commitment to display rules (CDR) on the relation of POJ to ED-A fit. Further, I examine how employee-customer identification (ECID) moderates the nature of the relationship of POJ through CDR to ED-A fit. Last, I test the sequential mediation effect of CDR and ED-A fit and the moderation effect of ECID on the indirect relationship of POJ to emotional labor and depletion. Participants were recruited via Prolific, an online crowdsourcing company. Regression analyses and Hayes’ (2018) PROCESS Models were mainly used to test the hypotheses. Research findings of this study are expected to contribute to research on emotional labor and fit perception as well.