| The health of organizations partly depends on the success of interactions between employees and customers, especially in service environments. Certain organizational rules of interaction and emotional display are established to ensure the employee-customer transaction goes smoothly and promotes the organization according to customer expectations. The current work proposes that the attitudes, provision of emotional support, and modeling behaviors of managers imputed by manager emotional intelligence (MEI) will create a blueprint by which employees may use these resources and model their own emotive efforts during the service interaction process. The satisfaction of interaction rules through the management of emotion and emotional display is called emotional labor. The rules dictating one’s emotional labor in the organizational setting may be explicitly managed, as in the case of a training program, or implicitly managed through the behavioral modeling by managers and seasoned employees. In the retail industry, store managers not only have the responsibility of maintaining operative business functions and an environment that is representative of the organization’s values, but they also are responsible for training, engaging, and motivating employees. Social Learning Theory explains that individuals perform according to observations of role models and continue various behaviors based on outcomes that serve to reinforce those behaviors (Bandura, 1986; Wood and Bandura, 1989). Invariably, the manager influences the perception, acceptance, and enactment of these rules in the organizational environment. However, there is no empirical information in the literature regarding the influence of managerial emotional intelligence on the relationship between emotional labor efforts and related outcomes. Liu, Prati, Perrewé and Ferris (2008) Downloaded by Göteborgs Universitet At 22:11 17 January 2018 (PT) expressed the need to investigate the extent to which social resources, such as manager instruction, support, and guidance, affect the use of emotional labor strategies through the provision of emotional resources. In an effort to address the gap in the literature, this effort suggests MEI provides the cultural and social resources necessary to influence employee perception, adoption, and execution of organizational display rules. The general proposal is that MEI contributes to attitudes, behaviors, and performance success of organizational members (see Figure 1). |