Stopping surface-acting spillover: A transactional theory of stress perspective.

Faking one's emotional display to fit situational norms, otherwise known as surface acting, has long been regarded as harmful to employees at work. A nascent body of literature has begun to examine the detriments of surface acting beyond the workplace, particularly as they spill over into the homelife. We articulate how the transactional theory of stress serves as a unifying framework that not only explains why surface acting tends to deplete employees and leads to maladaptive responses at home but also what coping strategies can be utilized to halt this spillover process. Using two complementary experience-sampling methodology studies of employee-spouse dyads, we test a spillover model of surface acting. In Study 1 and our Supplement to Study 1, we find support for the buffering role of challenge appraisals on the relationship between surface acting and depletion at work. We also find support for the mitigating role of supportive spousal interactions on the relationship between depletion at work and perceived inauthenticity at home. We also find support for the conditional indirect effect from surface acting at work to relationship satisfaction at home. In Study 2, we develop daily writing exercises to enhance challenge appraisals and supportive spousal interactions, and we find that these interventions also buffer the surface-acting spillover process. Overall, this work demonstrates the importance of both depletion and perceived inauthenticity at home as linked spillover mechanisms and reveals the success of agentic coping mechanisms (in both domains) that can buffer this process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Anxiety responses to the unfolding COVID-19 crisis: Patterns of change in the experience of prolonged exposure to stressors.

An immense amount of work has investigated how adverse situations affect anxiety using chronic (i.e., average) or episodic conceptualizations. However, less attention has been paid to circumstances that unfold continuously over time, inhibiting theoretical testing and leading to possible erroneous conclusions about how stressors are dynamically appraised across time. Because stressor novelty, predictability, and patterns are central components of appraisal theories, we use the COVID-19 crisis as a context to illustrate how variation in the phenomenon's patterns of change (specifically, total cases [average level] but also the rate of linear [velocity] and nonlinear growth [acceleration] in cases) influence anxiety. We also show the implications of anxiety for next-day functioning at work. These effects are tested in data drawn from a sample of employed adults in a daily diary study conducted in four overlapping waves. The data span the emergence, exponential rise, and initial tapering of the virus in the United States (February 10, 2020 to April 28, 2020). Our results show that although the impact of level of COVID-19 cases on anxiety decreases over time, the effect of change in cases (velocity and acceleration) increases over time. Anxiety is then associated with next-day work functioning (engagement, performance, and emotional exhaustion). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Turning frowns (and smiles) upside down: A multilevel examination of surface acting positive and negative emotions on well-being.

The consensus in the emotional labor literature is that surface acting is "bad" for employees. However, the evidence on which this consensus is based has been derived from contexts emphasizing the display of positive emotions, such as customer service. Despite the acknowledgment that many contexts also require the display of negative emotions, scholarly work has proceeded under the assumption that surface acting is harmful regardless of the valence of the emotion being displayed. In this study, we take a hedonic approach to well-being and challenge the consensus that surface acting is bad for employees by examining its effects on changes in emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction, through changes in positive and negative affect, for both positive and negative emotional displays. Using a within-person approach, we focus on managers, whose occupation calls for displays of both positive and negative emotions. Our 3-week, experience-sampling study of 79 managers revealed that faking positive emotions decreases positive affect, which harms well-being more than authentically displaying such emotions. In contrast and counter to what the extant literature would suggest, faking negative emotions decreases negative affect and increases positive affect, which benefits well-being more than authentically displaying such emotions. We further integrate construal level theory with hedonic approaches of emotion to identify trait construal level as an important boundary condition to explain for whom surface acting is harmful versus beneficial. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Changing experiences of work dirtiness, occupational disidentification, and employee withdrawal.

Research and theory concerning "dirty work" has largely focused on how employees cope with stable features of their jobs. From a study of employees' experiences across 6 weekly repeated measurements, we found that within-person increases in experienced dirtiness were positively related to their withdrawal behaviors and job change propensity indirectly through occupational disidentification. Assessed at the between-subjects level, team-oriented leadership moderated the indirect within-person effects of work dirtiness experiences on these outcomes. The relationships between elevations in experienced work dirtiness and occupational disidentification were more strongly positive at lower levels of team-oriented leadership. Analyses also showed that individuals' perceptions of occupational stigma independently moderated the within-person relationship between experienced dirtiness and occupational disidentification. We discuss theoretical implications for the literature on dirty work and practical implications for mitigating the adverse outcomes associated with experienced work dirtiness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).