The Moderating Role of Psychological Capital in The Relationship Between Emotional Labor and Work Alienation

The fact that the products and services are consumed at the moment when they are produced in tourism enterprises causes interaction between employees and customers. In this interaction, reflecting positive or negative feelings of the employees through their behaviors towards the customers causes customers to get a certain impression about the employee or the business and this affects the service quality of the enterprises. As a result of emotions in service sector as a determinant factor in customer interaction; In addition to their physical and mental efforts, they expect their employees to present their emotional efforts in the production process in order to increase the quality of service. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is a moderating effect of psychological capital in the relationship between emotional labor and work alienation with the participation of city hotels employees in the hotel sector, which is one of the sectors where customer satisfaction plays a key role in the competition. For this purpose, data were collected from 549 participants working in city hotels in Gaziantep, Adana and Osmaniye. In the analysis of the data, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyzes were made, correlations between variables were determined, and the model's goodness of fit model and regression analysis were performed with structural equation model. As a result of the analyzes, it has been determined that emotional labor has a significant negative effect on psychological capital and has a positive effect on work alienation. Additionally, psychological capital has been found to have a significant negative effect on work alienation. In addition, as a result of the moderating analysis, it was found that the psychological capital had a moderating role in the relationship between emotional labor and work alienation