Are All Smiles Created Equal? How Emotional Contagion and Emotional Labor Affect Service Relationships
Thorsten Hennig-Thurau and colleagues studied how two features of an employee's emotion shape customers' evaluations of a service encounter: how much positive emotion is shown, including smiling, and how authentic the display is. In a simulated encounter with 223 consumers, actors playing employees varied both in a two-by-two design. The authenticity of the emotional labour directly affected customers' emotions. Smiling did not, so the study found no support for simple, automatic emotional contagion in service interactions. The employee's emotions still influenced customer outcomes that matter to marketers.
Thorsten Hennig-Thurau and colleagues studied how two features of an employee's emotion shape customers' evaluations of a service encounter: how much positive emotion is shown, including smiling, and how authentic the display is. In a simulated encounter with 223 consumers, actors playing employees varied both in a two-by-two design. The authenticity of the emotional labour directly affected customers' emotions. Smiling did not, so the study found no support for simple, automatic emotional contagion in service interactions. The employee's emotions still influenced customer outcomes that matter to marketers.
Written from the crossref abstract record, read 2026-10-23.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Hennig-Thurau, T., Groth, M., Paul, M., & Gremler, D. D. (2006). Are all smiles created equal? How emotional contagion and emotional labor affect service relationships. Journal of Marketing, 70(3), 58-73. Read at the level of the abstract and a publisher summary.