Exploitative leadership and service employees’ emotional labor: The roles of psychological distress and spousal support

Due to the varying effects of different emotional labor strategies (i.e., surface acting and deep acting) regarding customer service experiences, scholars have shown considerable interest in exploring the determinants of emotional labor among frontline service employees. However, leadership-related factors, particularly destructive leadership, have remained largely unexplored. By focusing on an emerging form of destructive leadership—exploitative leadership—and linking it to emotional labor, we aim to address this research gap. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, we developed an integrative research framework to examine how and when exploitative leadership affects emotional labor, with particular emphasis on the mediating role of psychological distress and the moderating role of spousal support. Using partial least square-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), we analyzed data from a field survey of 352 frontline service employees. The results indicate that (1) exploitative leadership increases surface acting and decreases deep acting; (2) psychological distress mediates the relationship between exploitative leadership and emotional labor; and (3) spousal support mitigates the positive effect of exploitative leadership on psychological distress and the mediating effect of psychological distress. In addition to advancing existing knowledge on exploitative leadership and emotional labor, this study suggests that managers should foster a positive work environment by minimizing workplace exploitation and emphasizing external organizational support (i.e., spousal support) to optimize emotional labor strategies, thereby promoting healthy and sustainable employee–customer relationships and improving customer service experiences.