Depleted and Inauthentic? Dual Mechanisms Linking Daily Surface Acting to Problematic Drinking

Alcohol use represents a costly behavior for individual health and organizational competitiveness, with especially high prevalence rates in jobs involving frequent contact with customers and clients. Emotional labor, where individuals must regulate their emotions for a wage, is common to these jobs but shows mixed effects on alcohol use. We seek to remedy these mixed findings by testing predictions from the process model of depletion, along with felt inauthenticity as an additional mechanism based on the social interaction model of emotional labor. Results from a two-week experience sampling study of customer service workers indicated that both depletion and inauthenticity explained the link between surface acting and problematic drinking. We also explored boundary conditions, finding that trait dominance buffered the inauthenticity pathway consistent with the social interaction model, while trait self-control did not moderate the depletion pathway contrary to regulatory depletion predictions. These findings advance the emotional labor literature by highlighting the importance of motivational shifts in line with the process model of depletion, and the role of felt inauthenticity as an important but often ignored mechanism explaining the link between surface acting and health.