The mediating effect of customer relations on the interaction between emotional labor and burnout

With the development of service industry, human needs increased more than before, since people want to make their lives easier in order to use time efficiently. Emotional labor has become an even more important concept with the development of the service industry. Employees, who exhibit emotional labor mostly are the ones who interact with customers face to face. For this reason, taxi driving is one of the professions that exhibit most emotional labor. As the taxi drivers interact with many customers during the day, they must exhibit the rules of conduct which is necessary for their work, rather than presenting the real feelings they feel to be able to offer a good service. This in time leads to a difference between the feeling of the employee and the feeling that employee shows. This situation can lead to problems such as burnout. Within this frame, with this study, it was aimed to determine the relation between emotional labor and burnout and the effect of customer related factors on this relation. Hence, a research was applied to 212 taxi drivers who are working in Ankara's Çankaya district and registered to Ankara Chamber of Public Automobile Owners and Drivers. According to the research findings, the dimension of the emotional labor scale, surface acting was found to have a statistically significant relationship with all dimensions of burnout; deep acting and natural emotions were found to have a statistically significant positive relationship with only personal accomplishment dimension of burnout. Furthermore, it was found that there exists a partial mediator effect of some of the customer relations variables on the relation of emotional labor and burnout. Keywords: Emotional Labor, Burnout, Customer Relations, Taxi Drivers