If your employees are smiling at customers because you told them they have to, a new academic study has good and bad news for you.
The good news is that your "smile with service" strategy is likely effective, and earning you and your workers more money. Indeed, the benefits smiles can have on sales are widely heralded by both business leaders and researchers.
But the bad news is that the report's authors believe you should immediately abandon the strategy.
Recommended For You
"Organizations and customers should abandon formalized emotion display expectations and replace such efforts with more humanistic practices that support and value employees, engendering positive climates and an authentically positive workforce," concludes a study by three psychology professors at Penn State and Purdue.
Telling those who aren't naturally jolly to pretend to be is an exacting demand on an employee's emotional resources, argue the authors. It harbors dissonance, as the employee struggles to display unnatural emotions, leading to dissatisfaction with work and burnout.
Furthermore, the report authors argue that the effort put into conveying false emotions is equivalent to muscle exertion, and can prevent employees from focusing on other tasks. Perhaps a waiter who is forcing a smile while taking an order is more likely to write the order down wrong, for example.
The study was based on an examination of decades of psychological research on burnout among workers, from bus drivers and call center operators, who are expected to cheerily interact with customers on a daily basis.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
