The relationship between selected conflict management strategy and displayed emotional labor: A field study

This study was conducted to explore the relationship between the selected conflict management strategy and displayed emotional labor. Research participants are selected from the call center industry where customer service representatives working intensively with emotional labor. In total, 187 participants took part in the research. Pearson correlation analyse pointed out that there was a significant positive relationship between conflict management strategies and displayed emotional labor. To understand this relationship more deeply, impact of conflict management strategies (integrating, obliging, dominating, compromising and avoiding) was tested over emotional labor behaviours (surface acting and deep acting) with conducting hierarchical (step-wise) regression. The results revealed that Dominating, Integrating, and Obliging Strategies had positive and significant impacts on displaying Surface Acting. It was also found that Integrating Strategy had a significant and positive impact on both deep acting and genuine display. To point out that if there was a significant difference both in emotional labor behaviours and conflict management strategies based on demographic factors (gender, age, marital status, education level, length of service and department), t-tests and Anova tests were conducted. Results showed there was not a significant difference on displayed emotional labor behaviours based on subgroups of gender, marital status, education level, length of service. The only significant difference was found in surface acting based of age subgroups. Additionally, it was found there was not a significant difference for types of conflict management strategies based on gender, age and marital status but it has been also revealed that there was a significant difference within education level, length of service and department. The differences were found in integrating and compromising strategies based on department, in dominating and avoiding strategies based on education level, in integrating strategy based on length of service. The moderator effect of demographic factors in the relationship between types of conflict managements strategies and displayed emotional labor was also analyzed using data visualizations. Moderator effects of all demographics were pointed out in the relationship between dominating strategy and surface acting. Additionally, in the relationship between integrating strategy and deep acting, moderator effect of all demographic factors were seen except department factor. Based on the relationship between integrating strategy and genuine display except marital status and department factors, there has been found a moderator effect based on gender, age, education level and length of service. These results confirm that there is a significant and positive relationship between types of conflict management strategies and displayed emotional labor. In other words, it means that it would be useful trying to understand how employees choose their conflict management strategies and so it can be predicted how they would display emotional labor. It is thought that this research can be helpful for the future researches on emotional labor specifically in the sectors use emotional labor intensively like call center sector.