A Study of Emotional Labour Coping Strategies in Some Hotels in SouthEast Nigeria

The main objective of this study was to examine emotional labour coping strategies adopted and practiced by customer-contact employees in hotel organizations. Given the crucial role emotional labour plays during service encounters, the study emphasized and was motivated by the importance of managing employee emotions in relation to quality service delivery. In order to achieve above main objective, four specific objectives were examined. Data were gathered by the use of structured questionnaires designed in Likert format, and interviews. The focus groups were customer-service employees of the selected hotels. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS 17.0 software. Formulated hypotheses were tested using analysis of variance (ANOVA), Z-test and t-test for tests of significance. Analysis revealed that most service employees use surface acting (SA) more often than deep acting (DA) as coping strategies. It was observed that in all the variables studied, 5-star hotels were rated better than the others. The likely implication of above findings is that at the end of the shift, employees go home emotionally drained-up. Our conclusions are that workers’ emotion is poorly managed and emotional demand of customer service jobs is not very well appreciated. As above findings have serious human resource implications for the hotel industry in Nigeria, recommendations are made.