Ninth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Organization scholars who study workplace spirituality claim a positive link between spiritual beliefs among workers, positive psychology and performance at work. Nevertheless, there is a puzzling absence of empirical quantitative research on the relationship between personal spirituality, emotional labor and workers’ productivity. To fill this lacuna, the present study examines the mediative role of emotional labor practices (deep and surface acting) between religious and secular workers’ spirituality and their job performance (including objective productivity measures) among call center service representatives (N=182) of a large Israeli financial firm. Our main findings suggest that emotional labor strategies work in opposite ways, when comparing religious to secular and spiritual to non-spiritual employees. While “deep acting” increases performance among secular spiritual employees, among religious employees it decreases work performance. In contrast, “surface acting” positively affects the performance of religious employees and has no effect on the performance of secular spiritual employees.