Stopping surface-acting spillover: A transactional theory of stress perspective.

Faking one's emotional display to fit situational norms, otherwise known as surface acting, has long been regarded as harmful to employees at work. A nascent body of literature has begun to examine the detriments of surface acting beyond the workplace, particularly as they spill over into the homelife. We articulate how the transactional theory of stress serves as a unifying framework that not only explains why surface acting tends to deplete employees and leads to maladaptive responses at home but also what coping strategies can be utilized to halt this spillover process.

Anxiety responses to the unfolding COVID-19 crisis: Patterns of change in the experience of prolonged exposure to stressors.

An immense amount of work has investigated how adverse situations affect anxiety using chronic (i.e., average) or episodic conceptualizations.

Turning frowns (and smiles) upside down: A multilevel examination of surface acting positive and negative emotions on well-being.

The consensus in the emotional labor literature is that surface acting is "bad" for employees. However, the evidence on which this consensus is based has been derived from contexts emphasizing the display of positive emotions, such as customer service. Despite the acknowledgment that many contexts also require the display of negative emotions, scholarly work has proceeded under the assumption that surface acting is harmful regardless of the valence of the emotion being displayed.

Changing experiences of work dirtiness, occupational disidentification, and employee withdrawal.

Research and theory concerning "dirty work" has largely focused on how employees cope with stable features of their jobs. From a study of employees' experiences across 6 weekly repeated measurements, we found that within-person increases in experienced dirtiness were positively related to their withdrawal behaviors and job change propensity indirectly through occupational disidentification. Assessed at the between-subjects level, team-oriented leadership moderated the indirect within-person effects of work dirtiness experiences on these outcomes.