Are All Smiles Created Equal, How Emotional Contagion and Emotional Labor Affect Service Relationships, Hennig-Thurau, Thorsten

1. Are all smiles
created equal?
How emotional contagion and
emotional labor affect service
relationship
Pétur, Sigurbjörn & Zalan

2. Agenda
➔ About the article
➔ Emotional contagion
Conscious emotional contagion &
Unconscious emotional contagion
➔ Emotional labour
Surface acting & Deep acting
➔ Hypothesis
➔ Results
➔ What should market managers do?
Provide a simple unifying message for what
is to come

3. About the article
➔ The influence of service employee’s
display of positive emotions and the
authenticity of their emotional display on
customer’s emotional state.
➔ Customers’ assessments of the service
interaction and their relationship with the
service provider.
➔ The article proves the importance of
authenticated emotions.

4. Emotional contagion

5. Conscious emotional
contagion
-Individual actively searches for other person’s emotions
as a type of social information
-Adapts to their emotional state if it appears appropriate

6. Unconscious emotional
contagion
-The individual does not consciously adapt
to an emotional state
-Influenced unconsciously by spontaneously
imitating another person’s facial expressions

7. Emotional labor
Surface vs. Deep
➔ Surface acting
◆ Low authenticity of emotional
labor display
◆ Displaying an emotion that is
NOT felt but required
➔ Deep acting
◆ Displaying required emotions
WITHIN themselves
➔ “SERVICE AS THEATER”

8. Hypotheses
→ 11 hypotheses
→ Summarized in:
→ More smiles and authenticity.
=
Customer satisfaction,
loyalty and relationship

9. Results
Experiment
223 university students
3 actors
Movie rental service
Pre- and post-encounter questionnaire
Smiling
No significant effect on
positive customer satisfaction
Real emotions
Great effect on the emotion of
the customers

10. What marketing managers
should do?
Focus on
increasing
positive
customer
emotions
Smile! policy
Dealing with
authentic
emotions