The role of self-monitoring on emotional labor and jobsatisfaction relationship: A study on academics

The aim of this study is to investigate which emotional labor behaviors (surface acting, deep acting, genuine emotions) academicians prefer in business life, the relationship between their emotional labor behaviors and their job satisfaction and the role of self-monitoring in this relationship. The sample of the study consists of 436 academicians who work at state universities in Turkey. The results of the research show that most of the time academicians display genuine emotions when interacting with students while the least displayed behavior is surface acting. We also found that surface acting has a negative effect on job satisfaction while genuine emotions have a positive effect. On the other hand, deep acting doesn't have a significant effect on job satisfaction. In addition, even though the moderating effect of self-monitoring over the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction was not significant, the regressionan alysis results on the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction were found to be different under the different levels of self-monitoring (low-high). Accordingly, the positive effect of genuine emotions over job satisfaction was higher on participants with low self-monitoring than on participants with high self-monitoring. Moreover, the negative effect of the surface acting over job satisfaction was lower on participants with high self-monitoring.