Emotional display rules, guidelines for which emotion is appropriate for a given situation, have largely stayed in the background of research on emotional labor with most of the prior work focusing instead on the emotion regulation strategies of surface and deep acting. This dissertation brings emotional display rules to the foreground by focusing on where these display rules come from. Specifically, research has assumed that emotion regulation and emotional labor are a response to organizationally prescribed emotional display rules (such as displaying positive emotions to customers). I challenge this assumption (as well as other problematic assumptions made by the extant literature on emotional labor) by integrating situations where employees create their own display rules in response to the specific context they are in (for instance they might decide to show frustration towards a customer). Further, this dissertation asserts that the aforementioned narrow conceptualization of emotional display rules has had the unintended consequence of focusing only on a small portion of employees (i.e., those that attempt to follow the display rules prescribed to them by their organization). Across 3 studies, I developed two new measures capturing the situation-person interaction of emotional display rule sources and conduct both variable- and person-centered analyses that allow me to integrate previously unidentified subpopulations of employees into the larger emotional labor literature.
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