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Display rule perceptions and job performance in a Chinese retail firm: The moderating role of employees’ affect at work

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Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between emotional display rule perceptions and job performance. Building on theories of emotional labor and ego-depletion, we cast employees’ positive and negative affective states at work as crucial moderators. Results obtained in a sample of 245 frontline service employees and their 63 immediate supervisors from a retail firm in China demonstrate that display rule perceptions were positively related with task and contextual performance among employees experiencing little positive affective states at work, but not among employees experiencing highly positive affect. Moreover, display rule perceptions were positively associated with one aspect of contextual performance (voluntary learning) among employees with little negative affect, whereas highly negative affect buffered this linkage. Taken together, this study highlights performance consequences of employees’ display rule perceptions and uncovers key boundary conditions for these relationships.

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Notes

  1. Some service occupations (e.g., bill collectors, funeral directors) require expression of negative feelings (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987; Sutton, 1991). We will address this point in the Discussion section.

  2. We examined whether display rule perceptions might reflect a store-level variable. There was no significant Level-2 variance, however (ICC1 = .02, ns). Hence, consistent with previous research treating display rule perceptions as an individual-level phenomenon (e.g., Diefendorff & Richard, 2003; Schaubroeck & Jones, 2000), aggregation to the store level was not justified.

  3. Possible three-way interactions of display rule perceptions, negative affect, and positive affect were not significant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

    Catherine K. Lam

  2. Department of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

    Frank Walter

  3. Department of Management and Marketing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

    Kan Ouyang

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  1. Catherine K. Lam
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Lam, C.K., Walter, F. & Ouyang, K. Display rule perceptions and job performance in a Chinese retail firm: The moderating role of employees’ affect at work. Asia Pac J Manag 31, 575–597 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-013-9348-6

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