Dispositional Empathy, Emotional Display Authenticity, and Employee Outcomes

With the rise of jobs in the health care sector, research on emotional labor has become of increasing importance. In this study, we follow calls for scholars to include authentic emotional displays alongside the more traditionally examined emotional labor strategies (surface and deep acting) when examining the effects of employees' emotional performance at work. We theorize that dispositional empathy is an individual difference variable that influences whether and how employees regulate their emotional displays at work, and examine the indirect relationships between dispositional empathy and employees' self-reported job satisfaction, and objectively measured job performance and sickness absenteeism, through these emotional displays. Additionally, we examine how different types of job stressors (challenge and hindrance stressors) act as boundary conditions for the relationships of empathy with emotional displays and employee outcomes. Results from a study of 156 employees in a public hospital mostly supported our theoretical model. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.