Service with a smile: Emotional contagion in the service encounter
S. Douglas Pugh asked what leads employees to display emotion at work and what those displays lead to. He proposed that customers catch employees' affect through emotional contagion. Employees' displays of positive emotion went with more positive affect in customers after the encounter and with higher ratings of service quality. The paper also replicated earlier findings that how busy a transaction is and how emotionally expressive an employee is predict how much emotion the employee displays.
S. Douglas Pugh asked what leads employees to display emotion at work and what those displays lead to. He proposed that customers catch employees' affect through emotional contagion. Employees' displays of positive emotion went with more positive affect in customers after the encounter and with higher ratings of service quality. The paper also replicated earlier findings that how busy a transaction is and how emotionally expressive an employee is predict how much emotion the employee displays.
Written from the publisher-side abstract summary on an academic newsletter listing, read 2026-10-23; the OpenAlex record holds no abstract.
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44, 1018-1027. doi:10.2307/3069445. Read at the level of the abstract.