The mediating role of life satisfaction on the relationship between emotional labor behaviors and depression: Flight cabin crew sample

Emotional labor is a term defined as the act of expressing organizationally desired emotions during service transactions by workers and strongly associated with poor mental health in workers. Even though most of the research focuses on the emotional labor behavior and depression among sales workers, researchers suggest examining this relationship among flight cabin crew who are the frontline employees of the aviation industry and are salaried to smile. Life satisfaction is a related factor to emotional labor and strongly associated with depression. The aim of the study is to investigate the mediator role of life satisfaction in the relationship between emotional labor behaviors and depression levels among flight cabin crew. Participants were consisted of 222 (183 women and 39 men) between the ages from 23 to 45 (M=28.75, SD=4.63). In addition to Informed Consent Form, Socio-Demographic Infomation Form, Emotional Labor Scale (ELS), Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were used to collect data within paper-pencil techniques. Mediation modeling was tested by the bootstrapping sampling method (PROCESS-Model 4) and the results demonstrated that life satisfaction mediated the relationship between emotional labor behaviors, particularly surface acting, deep acting and naturally felt emotion, and depression. The findings provide information to understand the underlying mechanism of depression among workers especially work in an emotional labor industry and promising implications to improve intervention programs within life satisfaction among flight cabin crew for airlines companies and clinicians.