EXPLORING A REFINEMENT MEASURE OF DEEP ACTING ON BURNOUT

Abstract

While surface acting is negatively related to employees' well-being, deep-acting seems to bear mostly weak and non-generalizable relations with well-being outcomes. We suggest that inconclusive results may be explained by overly-global measures of deep acting that mixed several processes. We thus propose to measure cognitive change (ERQ, Christophe, Antoine, Leroy, Delehs, 2009), and attentional deployment, both emotion regulation strategies included in the definition of deep acting, and their respective impacts on burnout (Maslach Burnout Inventory) Our results indicate that cognitive change and attentional deployment, currently measured as composing a one-dimensional factor, have in fact different impacts on employees' burnout: cognitive change is associated with low levels of burnout while attentional deployment is positively related to burnout. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved). (journal abstract)