Strength and limitations of the study

This study has overall strengths and limitations. The scope of this dissertation was not to examine the entire structure of emotion work as presented in the Redefinition Self-Regulation Model of Emotion Work (Figure 2, p. 37) but rather to examine relevant predictor variables of emotion work job demands. One limitation is the possibility that important variables were not taken into account.

The interpretation of occupational differences in emotion work requirements and emotional dissonance by means of occupational differences in major task, service characteristics, and interdependence characteristics were more derived from plausibility conclusions. These findings need cross validation by further research, including explicit measurements of postulated occupation-specific major tasks, service-, and interdependence characteristics. One might also argue that the directional interpretation of field study findings in a cross sequential design needs to be examined in a cross panel design by further research. However, applying causal interpretation of experimental effects and nomological interpretation of field study findings regarding if and how organizational determinants affect emotional work, it is postulated that characteristics of organizational determinants are involved in how: (a) major tasks and customer demands lead to organizational display rules, and in turn how different occupations have different emotion work display rules; (b) how these display rules in combination with customer events can affect emotion work requirements and emotional dissonance; (c) that display rules are part of the organizational culture and acquired by socialization strategies; and (d) that self-imposed role expectations are relevant in the task redefinition of emotion work. There are also

validity and adequacy concerns regarding the research effort to explore determinants of emotion work using self description questionnaires. The FEWS (Zapf et al., 1999; Zapf et al., 2000) were applied, considered to be a behavior requirement approach in assessing job characteristics. It can be argued in support of this study that FEWS item scales are controlled for effects of individual characteristics and individual emotional and cognitive processing. The interpretation that hypothesized and revealed occupational differences in FEWS requirement scales and emotional dissonance are more affected by organizational determinants than by personal characteristics might be a somewhat cyclical interpretation. An alternative interpretation could be that idiosyncratic perceptions of job characteristics and strategies for dealing with demands vary systematically between occupations, influenced by personality-based decisions regarding work environments and voluntary turnover. This hypothesis was investigated in a study of effects of personality on emotion work, measured as job requirements and stressors with the FEWS (Fischbach & Zapf, 2003). The analyses revealed only small effects of personality variables and demonstrated the postulated differences in emotion work requirements and emotional dissonance, even after controlling for personality. This supports the assumption of organizational determinants affecting the reported requirements and stressors in the FEWS scales. One further limitation of this study might concern the professional identity scales that were developed and the testing of hypothesized effects of professional identity in the redefinition process of emotion work within the same samples. These results need cross-validation with independent samples.

However, it is expected that similar results can be shown in new samples due to the systematic and interpretable effects of professional identity scales among all

three highly diverse occupations within scales that lead to comparable results (e.g., assertion style reinforcing emotional dissonance vs. citizen/student orientation diminishing emotional dissonance in the police as well as teacher sample). A strength of this study is the multimethod approach, combining field studies with job incumbents and experiments with student samples to support assumptions derived from the RS Model. However, experiment limitations include that findings are based on a sample of students rather than professionals and that the short-term and controlled conditions of an experiment have nothing in common with actual work processes. The opposite could be argued: that an experimental setting with assigned tasks given to students, accompanied by written instructions, is just another work setting and job requirement results are as valid in this setting as any so-called actual work setting. Nevertheless, transferability of results and conclusions to workforce might be taken into question. The three experiments presented in this study show comparable results, all supporting the assumptions postulated for each experiment and derived from the RS Model. These reliable results give no reason to believe that the students reacted to the experimental manipulation dishonestly. This speaks to the internal validity of the experiments. Moreover, the shown effects, although in an unnatural and short-term situation, give rise to the possibility that these effects (holding all other variables constant) might be overestimated for real work situations. In real work situations, service workers might in fact suffer less from a single negative customer event combined with a display rule to act friendly, such as students did in the presented experiments, because they might be familiar with such situations and have developed well-honed strategies to handle such customers compared to inexperienced students. This presumption supports that in

real work life, the complexity of emotion work illustrated by the RS Model has to be taken into account in field research. The strength of this presented study was to separate hypotheses and show evidence of parts of the RS Model by reducing the complexity of emotion work. It is proposed that the empirically demonstrated experimental effects can be interpreted as starting points for efforts to understand emotion work and its complex dynamics in real work life.

To conclude, the results support the primary contention of this study—as proposed and illustrated in the RS Model—that emotion work and in particular the aspect of emotional dissonance can be viewed as an external task, entering the emotion work process independent of individual work behavior. It is proposed that the breadth of this concept of emotion work allows the examination of effects of several organizational consequences: positive as well as negative employee consequences, customer consequences, and inner organizational success consequences. The findings of this study speak to the benefits of mindful job design and redesign and managing emotion work organizational determinants to the extent possible, proactively preventing or minimizing individual negative consequences and enhancing individual positive consequences of emotion work (Zapf & Semmer, in press).