Do Customers Regulate their Emotions? Development and Validation of a Model of Customer Emotional Labor

Abstract

Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this article integrates service literature on value cocreation with the psychological literature on emotional labor. Highlighting the co-production of services by both customers and employees, this research applies emotional labor theory to customers’ emotion regulation and expression. We explore the argument that customers perceive emotional display rules in service establishments and engage in goaldirected emotion regulation (i.e., customer emotional labor; CEL), using qualitative (Study 1) and quantitative (Study 2) methodologies. Descriptive findings from Study 1 provide evidence for the existence of CEL. Study 2 assesses the psychometric soundness of a newly developed customer display rules scale, and quantitatively tests a conceptual framework by examining antecedents and outcomes of customer emotion regulation. Findings of each study, the implications of this work, and avenues for future service management research are addressed.