Emotional Labor and Family Emotional Work:The views of Scarcity Hypothesis and Enrichment Hypothesis

For companies in the service society, their competitive advantages come from their human resource and related service quality. In this case, company’s interest is closely related to employees’ working states. In the past, researches of emotional labor have focused mainly on the exchange value of emotional labor. However, some issues are ignored in the existing emotional labor researches. For example, few people discussed about the consequence of emotional labor as the employees behaves outside their working context. This research emphasized the perspective of multiple social roles. The point is, how employees do emotional labor in workplace as well as do family emotional work. It is aimed to understand that how people do emotional regulation in different contexts and follow-up individual effects. Questionnaire survey is used and 450 questionnaires are collected. After statistic analysis, there are some findings: (1) When employees try to display positive emotions in workplace, their positive affect would be raised. (2) People’s affect towards their workplace and family domain are influenced by direct mood spillover. Man’s positive affect towards their workplace would raise individual’s positive affect towards their family affect. This afterwards raises individual’s caring behaviors to their families. (3) As far as the process of “emotional labor – working affect – family affect – caring family behaviors” is concerned, gender difference is obvious. Female subjects’ data support the assumption of “enrichment hypothesis.” It means that women tend to use “spillover model” to handle their working and family relationship. On the other hand, male subjects’ data support neither the ideas of enrichment hypothesis nor scarcity hypothesis. To sum up, the effect of mood spillover is improved in this research, which modifies the process of enrichment hypothesis and scarcity hypothesis.