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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1437736
This article is part of the Research Topic Analysing Emotional Labor in the Service Industries: Consumer and Business Perspectives- Volume II View all 7 articles
Empowering leadership and frontline employees' emotional labor: the mediation effects of job passion
Provisionally accepted- Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, China
As competition intensifies, service organizations increasingly rely on delivering superior customer experiences to survive. Frontline employees, who represent the organization to interact with customers directly, need to regulate their emotional expression in their jobs. Through the lens of job passion, a mediating model is proposed wherein empowering leadership affects emotional labor through harmonious and obsessive. Using a survey of 1040 frontline employees in three service industries, the findings indicated that: empowering leadership predicted deep acting and reduced surface acting. Furthermore, job passion mediated the relationship between empowering leadership and emotional labor. Specifically, empowering leadership influenced surface acting only through obsessive passion.In contrast, empowering leadership demonstrated "double-edged" indirect influences on deep acting by harmonious and obsessive passion simultaneously.
Keywords: Empowering leadership, Job passion, Frontline employee, deep acting, Surface acting
Received: 24 May 2024; Accepted: 19 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cheng, Zhou, Liu and Ge. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Pengfei Cheng, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, China
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