Emotion Regulation And Turnover Intention: An Empirical Study Among Agents In Moroccan Call Centers

ABSTRACT: The concept of emotional labor refers to the management of emotions during interaction with customers in a service context (Hochschild, 1978, 1983). This concept involves the use of emotion-regulation strategies including: deep acting, surface acting and the expression of naturally felt emotions. Deep acting is a strategy that consists of adjusting feelings through the practice of some cognitive strategies. On the other hand, surface acting refers to faking emotions. The individual simulates positive emotions like empathy and hides or suppresses negative emotions like anger (Grandey and Sayre, 2019). The third emotion regulation involves the spontaneous expression of emotions without any regulatory adjustments. This article sheds light on the effects of emotion regulation strategies on turnover intention among agents in Moroccan call centers. A total of 390 questionnaires were collected online from call center agents located in different cities in Morocco. The model and hypotheses were tested using the Partial Least Square Structure Equation Modeling. The results reveal that both deep acting and surface acting have a positive effect on turnover intention, while the authentic expression of positive emotions has no significant effect on this variable. These findings have interesting theoretical and practical implications with regard to various human resources and management functions including recruitment, employee retention, training, performance, and employee well-being. KEYWORDS: Emotion regulation, turnover intention, surface acting, deep acting, authentic expression of emotions, call center