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The Relationship Between Emotional Labor and Burnout Among Call Center Agents in El

Salvador: The Moderating Effect of Customer Mistreatment

Background

In the last decade, many American companies have decided to move their call center services
abroad. According to a survey made by Deloitte (2016), due to costs reductions, companies
appoint outsourcing overseas as part of their business strategy. According to Deloitte survey,
India is one of the most preferred choices for offshoring, but lately, Latin American countries
have also become an attractive market. In Central America, more than 103 call centers have been
installed in the area (SIICEX, 2015) including El Salvador, which is one of the countries with
call center business that generates more than 17,000 employments in the sector (Barrera, 2015).

Despite the economic benefits that outsourced call center service provides, there is a negative
side that is affecting employees in these industries. For call center agents, receiving customer
phone calls on the daily basis represents a stressful job, due to the placement of supervisory and
monitory activities on them (Holman, 2005) this also includes the fulfillment of displayed rules,
which means behavior standards established by the company to achieve organizational purposes.
Added to this, call center agents cope with constant mistreatment from customers, which
involves offensive or disrespectful actions against them (Dormann & Zapf, 2004). Literature
suggests the utilization of two strategies for the control of emotions: Surface and deep acting.
Surface acting refers reflecting an external emotion with no significant effort. Deep acting
consists on awakening specific feelings from the inside, even if these feelings are not legitimate,
inducing the display of an authentic feel for the job. However, little research has been done on
the moderating effect of customer mistreatment between emotional labor and burnout,
specifically in the call center industry. Based on the literature, the current study aims to explore
whether emotional labor and customer mistreatment might influence call center agents’ burnout.

Theoretical framework

Many researchers have been interested in the role that emotions play in the customer
service industry. Employees who work attending customers are expected to display certain
emotions and suppress others, and this effort of managing emotions in exchange for a wage has
been defined as “emotional labor” (Hochschild, 1983). Diefendorff & Richard (2003) stated that
employees incurred in emotional labor to satisfy the expectations of the company for complying
specific standards, known as display rules (Ekman & Friesen, 1982). In the customer service
field, emotion regulation seems to be part of the daily job routine expected from the employee
(Wharton & Erickson, 1995). To provide a service that meets organizational standards,
employees might use some strategies to manage their emotions while interacting with customers:
Surface acting or deep acting (Grandey, 2000; Gross, 1998; Hochschild, 1983). However,
researches show that emotional labor can produce positive and negative effects. Zapf, Vogt,
Seifert, Mertini, and Isic (1999) pointed that emotional labor was associated with feelings of
personal accomplishment and emotional exhaustion, being this a dimension of burnout.
Therefore, call center agents with a high demand of emotional labor might increase the burnout
at work. Based on the literature, the following hypothesis is developed:

Hypothesis 1. Emotional labor is positively related to call center agent burnout.

Although there is a growing interest on the predictors of employee burnout, few studies
intended to identify potential moderators for the relationship between burnout and its predictors.
This study proposes customer mistreatment as a moderator.

Customer mistreatment is referred to any action that incurred in offensive, demeaning,


disrespectful or aggressive treatment from the customer to the employee (Dormann & Zapf,
2004; Grandey et al., 2004) and is viewed as a daily commotion that is commonly expressed in a
verbal way rather than physical. Despite the low intensity that this type of mistreatment may
represent a frustrating situation, could affect the well-being of the employee (Sliter, Jex, Wolford,
& McInnerney, 2010).

Customer mistreatment is more accessible to observe in the customer-employee


interaction. A possible situation found is that mistreatment to employees could be intentional or
not from the customer, some reasons of deliberate mistreatment are associated with the
dissatisfaction of the service received or due to customer’s attitudes, such as high trait anger,
high neuroticism, etc. (Bedi & Schat, 2007). Previous studies had pointed out that customer
mistreatment involves interactional injustice, which is perceived when the employee is pointed
with disrespectful behaviors from another party and unclear communication, making them feel
that are being treated unfairly (Rupp, McCance, & Grandey, 2007; Bies & Moag, 1986).
When the employee receives mistreatment from the customer, is more likely that
employee will perceive this situation as stressful, affecting his capability to complete his/her task
successfully (Grandey, 2000; Wang, Liao, Zhan, & Shi, 2011). Baranik, Wang, Gong, and Shi
(2014) stated that customer who receives constant customer mistreatment finds hard to achieve
well-being. Dormann and Zapf (2004) observed that employees who are exposed to customer
mistreatment present more burnout symptoms.

Many companies have adopted the philosophy “The customer is always right,” in which
the employee should act in a friendly manner toward the employees and control their attitudes
and behaviors, even if the customer shows verbal aggression (Yagil, 2008). Dormann and Zapf
(2004) reported that customer aggression might lead to emotional exhaustion, due to the
emotional dissonance encountered at the moment of expressing an emotion on the outside and
holding the authentic feeling on the inside. There is scattered literature studying the moderating
role of customer mistreatment between emotional labor and burnout, however, based on the
literature reviewed before, has been considered that customer mistreatment involves emotion
management, thus enhancing burnout. Therefore, the following hypothesis has been developed:

Hypothesis 2: Customer mistreatment act as a moderator between emotional labor and


burnout. Customer mistreatment strengthens the relationship between these two variables.

Research framework
Methodology and Sample

This study is being conducted among call center agents in El Salvador. Data of this study
will be collected using an online self-administered questionnaire. More than 100 valid
questionnaires are expected to be obtained from October to November 2017. The questionnaire
contains four major sections. Section one includes 13 items measuring emotional labor, which
was adopted from Naring, Briet and Brouwer’s (2007) Dutch Questionnaire on Emotional Labor
(D-QEL). This questionnaire contains four subscales to measure the dimensions of emotional
labor: surface acting (α=.79), deep acting (α=.70), emotional consonance (α=.70), and
suppression (α=.61). Emotional labor will be measured using five-point Likert scale (1=never,
5=always).

Section two measures customer mistreatment with 18 items with five-point Likert scale
(1=never, 5=all the time). These items were adapted from Dormann and Zapf’s (2004) 21-item
customer-related social stressors and 8 items from Skarlicki et al.’s (2008). According to
Dormann and Zapf research, coefficient alpha was not an appropriate indicator to provide a
reliability estimate for this scale because it includes different variety of customer mistreatment
behaviors experienced by the employees. Section three measures burnout, using Maslach
Burnout Inventory (Maslach et al., 1996). The scale is seven-point Likert scale (0=never,
6=every day), including 22 items measuring three dimensions: emotional exhaustion (α=.90),
depersonalization (α=.79), and personal accomplishment (α=.71). Section four deals with social
desirability as control variable and section five with demographic information such as gender,
age, nationality, native language…, etc.

Snowball and convenient sampling approach will be used for data collection. Participants
will receive an e-mail with the link directing to survey and also encourage to forward the e-mail
to friends who also work at call centers as customer service agents.

With the findings of this study, it is expected to provide some implications for call centers
in El Salvador. This study will help call center companies create strategies to reduce burnout in
their employees; at the same time, finding ways to deal with customer mistreatment will generate
a better feeling for call center agents while doing their work.

Keywords: emotional labor, customer mistreatment, burnout, call center agents.


References

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