5. Discussion
The current study has offered an empirical verification of the link between leader surface and deep acting and followers’ organizational commitment. Parallel to anticipated hypotheses, this study validates that leader deep acting has a significant favorable link with all the three components of organizational commitment i.e. followers’ affective, normative and continuance commitment. On the other hand, leader surface acting verifies a significant negative link with followers’ affective, normative and continuance commitment. These findings are consistent with the previous research which suggests that emotional labor has the ability to predict organizational commitment (Cho et al., 2013; Shin et al., 2015). The findings also support earlier research on strategic HRM which recommends that fair HRM practices can be helpful in encouraging followers and making them a pillar of competitive gain, which further have added benefits for high performance work systems (Datta et al., 2005).
On the whole, this study adds to extent literature and theory in four important ways. Firstly, the present study offered an extension of social exchange theory (Blau, 1964; Homans, 1958), in the setting of emotional labor via assessing the differential base of deep and surface acting on followers’ affective, normative and continuance commitment, therefore, broadens the theoretical understanding of this phenomenon. Secondly, researchers have shown rising interest in reviewing emotional labor outcomes. Thus this study responded these calls by clarifying the mechanism owing to leader surface and deep acting impacts followers’ behaviors (Fisk and Friesen, 2012; Grandey and Gabriel, 2015; Humphrey et al., 2015), hence, contributes to extent literature stressing the positive/negative outcomes of leader emotions on followers’ attitudes. The third theoretical addition is that, so far, extent of emotional labor literature has discussed on employees’ emotional labor towards customers’.
