How Emotional Labor and Ethical Leadership Affect Job Engagement for Chinese Public Servants

Responsiveness is important in public-service delivery. This study explores three elements that contribute to responsiveness—emotional labor, job engagement, and ethical leadership. Three findings emerge: First, in terms of workers and their expression of work-related emotion, authentic emotive expression relates positively with job engagement while pretending to feel the emotion being displayed has a negative relationship. Second, ethical leadership moderates the relationship between pretending and job engagement, in that higher levels of ethical leadership lessen the negative influence of pretense in emotive expression. This means that when employees must mask how they feel, ethical leadership compensates for the deleterious effect of expressing an emotion other than what one is feeling. This, in turn, helps to prevent decreased job engagement. Third, ethical leadership does not affect the relationship between authentic emotive expression and job engagement. The sample surveyed are government employees in China.