The Relationship between Employees’ Competences and the Consequences and Manner of Exercising Emotional Labour (EL)

Many job posts require one to display emotions specified by organisational standards. Such work is referred to as emotional labour (EL) and consists in producing particular emotional reactions in contacts with a customer as well as suppressing the actual emotional reactions that could be seen negatively by the other party. An employee may cope with such work by choosing one of two strategies: surface acting or deep acting. Emotional labour has various consequences, and professional burnout is among the negative ones. The objective of the article is to review the literature concerned with the exercise and the consequences of EL and analyse the relationship between surface and deep acting and the level of professional burnout among selected professional groups (N=297). Furthermore, the authors examine the correlation between an employee’s competences and their preferred style of EL and assess the moderating role of competences in negative consequences of EL. Analyses confirm that the persons characterised by surface role-playing display a higher level of professional burnout; however, no correlation is found between deep role-playing and lower professional burnout. Analysis of the coefficients of correlation demonstrates no significant correlation between an employee’s competences and deep acting, whereas a statistically significant correlation is discovered between competences and the surface strategy. The higher the competences, the less likely the employee will exercise surface acting. Verification of the last hypothesis reveals that people with a higher level of competences who follow the surface strategy in terms of faking emotions are characterised by a lower level of professional burnout than employees with lower competences.


Introduction
The practical experiences of employees show that work is more and more commonly connected with display-ing a certain type of emotion (Ashforth & Humphrey, tions they display (Morris & Feldman, 1996;Szczygieł, Bazińska, Kadzikowska-Wrzosek, & Retowski, 2009).
Such work can give rise to both positive consequences, e.g., taking pride in or having high satisfaction with work (Jin & Guy, 2009), and negative consequences connected with emotional exhaustion (Seery & Corrigall, 2009), professional burnout (Babakus, Yavas, & Ashill, 2011;Jin & Guy, 2009), or lower commitment or absence from work (Chau, Dahling, Levy, & Diefendorff, 2009). Enterprises that introduce behavioural standards regulating emotional reactions hope to produce positive effects such as customer satisfaction and loyalty as well as increased organisational revenue (Hwa, 2012) but underestimate the negative consequences of the phenomenon. The difficulty in evaluating the potential negative consequences of emotional labour arises from the existence of multiple moderating variables related to both persons and organisations. This analysis is focused on identifying the role of selected variables related to persons, including employees' competences. Until now, in addition to the most commonly analysed influence of emotional intelligence on the consequences of emotional labour (Rathi, 2014), research has stressed the role of personality variables (Brook, 2013), reaction styles (Groth, Hennig-Thurau, & Walsh, 2009;Judge, Woolf, & Hurst, 2009), effects (Judge et al., 2009), and the system of values (Diefendorff & Gosserand, 2003).
Identification of these variables is of immense importance in cognitive terms and contributes to a better understanding of the nature of a reaction, but it does not offer many possibilities for application in the practice of human resource management. The authors, however, see such a chance in indicating the dependencies between competences and the consequences of EL, as competences are more and more commonly used in recruitment, evaluation, or development of employees.
Thus, the objective of the article is to indicate the role of competences in coping with emotional labour.

Emotional labour
Looking after the client is a significant element of running a business; therefore, employees are required to meet numerous demands in terms of displaying emotions. An example is work as a client adviser, which requires an employee to adopt a positive attitude towards the client and to use impeccable manners and body expression to mask feelings and emotions that might negatively influence the client's opinion. Arousing and experiencing emotions is dependent on various social factors, and people generally strive to feel emotions that are in compliance with a given social situation and accepted norms (Hochschild, 1979). This is particularly visible in professional life (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995;Grandey, 2000;Hochschild, 2009), and in consequence employees endeavour to moderate their emotions adequately according to organisational requirements. Management of emotions as an element of one's role at work is referred to as emotional labour -which means that employees must show or suppress given feelings to create the impression that will evoke a desired state of the client's mind (Hochschild, 2009).
Emotional labour is mainly the domain of employees in the service sector, as they represent the company in contacts with clients and interact frequently with clients (Hochschild, 2009;Morris & Feldman, 1996;Rafaeli & Sutton, 1990). However, emotions are also a significant part of work in the public sector, e.g., in public administration bodies where the level of bureaucratisation seems to be correlated with suppression of emotions (Vigoda-Gadot & Meisler, 2010), and among people working in professions that require a certain relation to be built with a client, high moral standards to be demonstrated, and services to be of high quality, e.g., doctors, psychologists, nurses, or teachers (Bajcar, Borkowska, Czerw, & Gąsiorowska 2011, p. 11). Various determinants may influence display of emotions, not only organisational requirements but also particularities of the client, such as their age, gender, or even social status (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1990).
Analysing the spectrum of factors determining emotional labour, it may be concluded that it is an element that is present to some extent in any profession; however, some professions require particular devotion to emotional labour, which prompts employees to adopt a strategy of emotion regulation. Hochschild (1979) presumes that workers may achieve this in two ways: by deceiving others in playing an appropriate role or by convincing both others and oneself of genuine experience of the required emotions. These strategies are respectively referred to as surface acting and deep acting or role-playing (Hochschild, 1979). Sur-The relationship between employees' competences and the consequences and manner of exercising emotional labour (EL) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. face acting consists in limiting emotion management to exclusively displaying an emotion without experiencing it. A shop assistant will smile at a demanding customer while masking irritation, and a prison guard will show power and dominance with verbal expression and posture while in fear of a prison riot. In both cases, the employees merely camouflage their true feelings. Deep acting is more complex than surface acting, as in deep acting an employee puts effort into feeling the emotion that is appropriate in a given situation.
Emotion management through surface and deep acting brings about various consequences, both positive and negative (Grandey, 2000). Research demonstrates that surface acting is correlated with the sense of tiredness and isolation because it requires greater energy to correct feelings and constantly monitor and mask one's emotions (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002;Gradney, 2000;Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011). Furthermore, in comparison to deep acting, surface acting creates greater difficulty in maintaining positive emotions in the face of stress provoked by the discord between true and presented feelings, which is reflected by a higher level of exhaustion and a less positive assessment of one's own work (Totterdell & Holman, 2003).
Emotional labour is also correlated with the level of authenticity of emotion -surface acting lowers the level of authenticity, whereas research has shown no such correlation in the case of deep acting (Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011). As Brotheridge and Gardney (2002) conclude: although both surface and deep acting allow employees to express the emotions desired by the organisation, the physiological state produced by the actual emotions felt remains, which may negatively influence employee health and level of stress. The effect of such influence may be the emergence of professional burnout in an employee affected by emotional labour (Babakus et al., 2011;Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002;Grandey, 2003;Hochschild, 2009;Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011, Hwa, 2012Jin & Guy, 2009, Maslach, Schaufeli & Leiter, 2001Seery & Corrigall, 2009, Zapf, Seifert, Schmutte, & Mertini, & Holz, 2001).

Negative consequences of emotional labour -professional burnout
The phenomenon of professional burnout has been studied since the 1970s. It has been discussed mainly in the context of service professions following the cultural transformations in the 1960s, when clients started to demand greater care, empathy, and emotional input from employees but did not reciprocate their efforts, which amplified the feeling of exhaustion and lack of appreciation (Schaufeli, Leiter & Maslach, 2009). It is believed that because of the article by Herbert Freudenberger -one of the pioneers in research on burnout -this set of symptoms acquired the name professional burnout (Sęk, 2004, p. 7). Dynamic development of the concept of professional burnout took place owing to the research and publications of the American psychologist Christina Maslach, among others, who not only created a theoretical model of burnout but also co-authored a tool serving to measure it. Maslach and Jackson (1984) defined professional burnout with a threefactor model including a psychological syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and lower opinion of one's personal achievements, which may appear in people working with other people. They call the sense of emotional overburdening accompanied by a simultaneous shortage of emotional resources emotional exhaustion. Depersonalisation is negative and often seen in reaction to people who are usually clients or subordinates of the person suffering from professional burnout, whereas a low opinion of one's personal achievements is related to a low opinion of one's competences and successes at work (Maslach & Jackson, 1984;Maslach et al., 2001). Another researcher, Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner and  proposed a model of professional burnout consisting of two dimensions: exhaustion, i.e., general tiredness, bad mood, and fear in reaction to organisational stress, and loss of commitment, i.e., withdrawal from one's work owing to difficulty in meeting professional requirements.
Professional burnout seems to be a threat to any employee because the factors causing this syndrome to emerge are varied and common. However, practice demonstrates that some professional groups are more susceptible to burnout, e.g., where employees maintain contacts with other people, such as clients, patients, and subordinates (Jenkins & Maslach, 1994;Schaufeli et al., 2009 suppress some emotions and be empathic towards the client (Maslach et al., 2001;Zapf et al., 2001).
Variables related to emotional labour partially correspond to organisational variables that are stressors influencing professional burnout, e.g., emotional labour is connected to time pressure placed on establishing positive relations with clients (Zapf et al., 2001). In such cases, the manner of coping with emotional labour, i.e., reacting through surface or deep acting, may be seen as a determinant of the symptoms of professional burnout. The two styles interact differently with each of the three factors contributing to burnout: the syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and lower opinion of one's personal achievements.
Research has confirmed the hypothesis that sur-

Employee Competences
Competences have been present in the practice and theory of human resource management for over 40 years. In understanding the significance of competences seen as the internal potential of an employee, the publications by D. C. McClelland and his follower R. E. Boyatzisa have been groundbreaking (Boyatzis, 1982;2008;McClelland & Boyatzis, 1980;McClelland, 1973). These authors first stress the relationship between an employee's effectiveness in a given post and his internal predispositions. Boyatzis defines competences as "the potential, existing within the human, leading to such a behaviour that helps to satisfy the requirements at a given post" (Boyatzis, 1982, p. 18). Competences are most commonly treated as a collection of three components: knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Kossowska & Sołtysińska, 2002;Sidor-Rządkowska, 2006;Thierry, Monod, & Sauret, 1994, p. 90); however, they may also include motivation, personality traits, values, self-esteem, and social role (Spencer & Spencer, 1993). As Dubois and Rothwel put it, defining competences moves towards including each trait of an individual that allows them to achieve the expected results in a given post (Dubois & Rothwel, 2008, p. 32). In the present analysis, competences are treated as a collection of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, whereas personality traits or motivation are rather the conditions for building and manifesting competences and not the competences themselves.
The American approach to competences focuses on universal models of the most effective managers and person-related conditioning of effectiveness, The relationship between employees' competences and the consequences and manner of exercising emotional labour (EL) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
while the British approach focuses on analysis of the requirements of a profession or a job post (Boak & Coolican, 2001;Garavan & McGuire, 2001, p. 150 (Filipowicz, 2004, pp. 19-38). Owing to the availability of a great variety of lists and models of competences (Filipowicz, 2004;Oleksyn, 2006;Wood, 2006), we have decided to adopt the model of competences making use of six clusters of competences (Springer, 2011).
The basic competence clusters singled out by Springer (2011)

Research Methodology
The

Research results
Eleven variables are analysed in the study, three of which characterized emotional labour, two professional burnout, and six competences. The reliability of all the scales is verified with the Cronbach's alpha coefficient, indicating the integrity of the adopted tool.
The coefficients for all the adopted scales have satisfac-   Simultaneously, there is a statistically significant correlation between competences and surface acting observable in many cases. It is thus worth highlighting that this relation is inversely proportional, and hence the higher the level of competences, the less likely the employee will undertake surface acting. Comparison of employees with low and high levels of competences within a given competence cluster (with the median of the obtained scores as the point of division) reveals that employees who are highly organized, focused on     It is worth stressing that putting effort into faking emotions has negative consequences such as professional burnout regardless of the level of an employee's competences (see table 6).

Discussion of the results
The objective of this study was to verify four hypotheses regarding correlations among the variables: deep and surface acting in emotional labour, the level of professional burnout, and the level of competences.
First, the correlations between surface and deep roleplaying and the level of professional burnout were examined. In accordance with the results of international research (Gardney, 2003;Hwa, 2012;Judge et al., 2009;Morris, & Feldman, 1996;Seery & Corrigall, 2009;Totterdell, & Holman, 2003), analyses have demonstrated that surface role-playing is correlated with a higher level of professional burnout, whereas there is no such correlation in the case of deep acting.
As initially presumed, surface acting requires greater effort to be put into correcting feelings and monitoring one's emotions, which influences the sense of exhaustion that is a component of burnout (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002;Gradney, 2000;Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011). Moreover, surface acting requires maintaining distance from clients and deceiving them though the expression of appropriate emotions, which results in lower commitment to doing one's job (Brotheridge & Gardney, 2002;Hochschild, 2009;Zapf at al., 2001). Studies have not confirmed the existence of a correlation between deep acting and a lower level of professional burnout, although such an opinion can be found in the relevant literature (Gardney, 2003;Hülsheger, & Schewe, 2011).
Second, the hypothesis that an employee's competences differentiate the style of emotional labour (i.e., surface or deep acting) was verified. Six competence clusters were singled out in the study, and tests were performed to determine whether these clusters differentiate the selected style of emotional labour. Analysis of the coefficients of correlation demonstrated no dependencies between employees' competences and deep acting. It was particularly surprising to find that there is no significant correlation between compe-tences connected with application of emotions, which is inconsistent with previous research that indicated that emotional intelligence influenced deep acting (Rathi, 2014). Simultaneously, a statistically significant correlation was noted between competences and the adoption of the surface strategy -the higher the level of competences, the less likely the employee would undertake surface acting. The above result may arise from the fact that persons characterised by a higher level of competences have greater self-confidence, are thus less worried about the consequences of displaying their emotions, and resort less often to hiding or faking emotions.
The final hypothesis assumed that employees with higher competences experience fewer negative consequences of emotional labour. The analyses that were conducted revealed that people with a higher level of competences that follow the surface strategy by faking emotions are characterised by a lower level of professional burnout than employees with a lower level of competences. It has simultaneously been proven that putting effort into faking emotions has negative consequences such as higher professional burnout regardless of the level of an employee's competences.
The above result may arise from the effort that employees must put into maintaining positive emotions in the face of stress caused by a discord between the actual and presented states of mind, which, independently from other variables, increases the sense of exhaustion and lowers the opinion of one's own work (Totterdell & Holman, 2003).

Conclusions and recommendations
The obtained results show that surface acting in emotional labour coexists with a higher level of professional burnout. This has serious consequences for employees and the company because professional burnout involves lower commitment to one's work and higher exhaustion, which usually results in decreased effectiveness. It is thus worth analysing the organisational requirements that cause employees to hide or fake worth checking the candidate's competences in individual competence groups. It is also worth considering the possibility of training employees engaged in emotional labour to develop given competences and prevent professional burnout. The authors are aware of the limitations of the presented study, which are concerned with the selection and size of the sample and the use of self-assessment to diagnose the level of competences. This study uses a self-reporting tool, which means that evaluation of competences might have been subjective and dependent, e.g., on the level of self-esteem or the respondent's experience. To verify the research results, it is advisable that the sample of the respondents be increased and more objective methods be used to diagnose employee competences. Analyses may also be carried out based on a division of the respondents in terms of job type, e.g., related to education or trade. This would allow analysis of the manner of coping with emotional labour, the level of professional burnout, and the competences of employees in a given profession.