This paper examines the role of core self-evaluations (CSEs) in the relationships among emotional demands, emotional dissonance, and depersonalization. Data were collected from a non-random sample of 423 teachers who worked in primary, secondary, and higher education institutions. Results from structural equation modeling analysis showed that CSEs displayed both direct and indirect effects on depersonalization through employees' perceptions and reactions to emotional labor. Specifically, those individuals with more positive CSEs tended to perceive the emotional aspects of their job as less demanding, thus being less likely to experience emotional dissonance and, in turn, depersonalization. This research demonstrated that CSEs play a vital role in explaining employees' reactions to emotional labor and, therefore, their effects should be properly accounted for in future studies. Implications for practice and future lines of research are discussed in this paper.

The purpose of this study was twofold. The first aim was to analyze the detrimental effect that emotional dissonance may have on service workers by testing its relationship with job satisfaction, intention to leave the organization, and organizational deviance. The second was to test whether two types of social support (i.e., co-worker and organizational support) and their combination moderate these relationships from a multilevel perspective. The sample was composed of 556 employees from Spanish service sector. Using random coefficient models analyses, results showed, first, that emotional dissonance was related to lower levels of job satisfaction (PE = –.1, p < .05) and higher levels of intention to leave the organization (PE = .12, p < .05); second, that co-worker support moderate the relationship between emotional dissonance and job satisfaction (PE = .10, p < .05), organizational deviance (PE = –.08, p < .05), and intention to leave the organization (PE = –.13, p < .05); third, organizational support, conceptualized as a collective construct at organizational level, moderate the relationship between emotional dissonance and organizational deviance (PE = –.08, p < .05); and finally, the combination of both types of support do not explained additional variance of the emotional dissonance-outcomes relation. These results underline the need to take into consideration different source of social support and their levels of analysis to better understand emotional dissonance and its outcomes.

Conflicting empirical findings in studies assessing the relationship between emotional labour and negative job outcomes are partly due to the lack of clarity regarding the conceptualisation and measurement of emotional dissonance. Emotional dissonance has been variously described and measured as an antecedent or as a consequence of the performance of emotional labour, as well as an inherent component of emotional labour. Recent conceptualisations of dissonance have proposed a mediator role for emotional dissonance between emotional labour and the outcome of emotional exhaustion. Concepts from cognitive dissonance theory support this conceptualisation and were used to empirically test this proposed relationship with a sample of 181 staff from two tourism based organisations providing a range of visitor/customer services. The results demonstrated a significant partial mediation role for emotional dissonance in the relationship between emotional labour and emotional exhaustion, supporting the use of a more theoretically and methodologically consistent measure of emotional dissonance.