Award Date

August 2016

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Hospitality Management

First Committee Member

Robert Woods

Second Committee Member

Christine Bergman

Third Committee Member

Gail Sammons

Fourth Committee Member

Timothy Bungum

Number of Pages

107

Abstract

Service delivery has become increasingly important in service heavy industries and particularly within restaurants. Within this segment, the employee’s ability to display the appropriate emotions is of great concern. The axiom “service with a smile”, has been a mainstay for many years. However, a frown has the opposite effect. The question has been raised, how do frontline employees manage their emotions so as to provide the service with the appropriate emotion and the feeling of a genuine connection? This form of labor has been coined, emotional labor, and has a research stream dedicated to its understanding.

This dissertation utilized a 2 (emotional labor) x 2 (service quality) x 2 (purpose of consumption) experimental design manipulating each one of the preceding variables. The results indicated that, opposed to expectations, purpose of consumption did not play a significant role in satisfaction or loyalty. Conversely, both emotional labor and service quality played a significant role on both satisfaction and loyalty. In addition the interaction of service quality and emotional labor had a significant impact on satisfaction. These results indicate that emotional labor does impact satisfaction and loyalty, however, it has a much greater impact when the more tactical service quality is in place.

Keywords

Emotional labor; Loyatly; Purpose of consumption; Satisfaction; Service quality

Disciplines

Business Administration, Management, and Operations

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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