Effects of emotional labor on adventure tour leaders' job satisfaction

The aim of this study was to examine the potential effects of two types of emotional labor, surface acting and deep acting, on the job satisfaction of adventure tour leaders employed within Australia. While surface acting refers to faking feelings that are not really felt, or hiding feelings that are inappropriate to display, deep acting is concerned with aligning one's true feelings with the ones required by the job. An online survey measuring adventure tour leaders' levels of emotional labor and job satisfaction was made available on the Internet for a period of 2 months. A sample of 137 participants responded to this survey. The results show that while deep acting has a statistically significant positive impact on adventure tour leaders' job satisfaction, there is no statistically significant relationship between surface acting and job satisfaction. These findings are consistent with research suggesting that deep acting could help to convey a sense of authenticity and a feeling of achievement in employees, thus leading to higher levels of job satisfaction. This, in turn, has implications for the way adventure tour operators manage their employees in relation to human resource management areas such as recruitment, selection, training, development, performance appraisal, and retention.