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In the past five year, the live streaming industry in China has boomed with the rise of 4G technology and ubiquitous usage of smartphone (Zheng, Xiong, Chen, & Li, 2022; Zheng, Fan, Wang, & Liu, 2021; Zheng et al., 2022). Social Networking Sites (SNS) and e-commerce platforms have provided a foundation for the rapid development of live streaming commerce. According to Mckinsey’s report, live streaming commerce in China grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 280 percent from 2017 to 2020, reaching an estimated 171 billion US dollars in 2020①. In the first half of 2020, there were more than 10 million live streams and more than 400,000 active live streamers.
During the live streaming, the streamers show how products are developed and used according to viewers’ needs, clarify any areas of their confusion, and interact with them in real-time to stimulate immediate purchases. To keep viewers watching longer, live streamers make their shows as engaging and immersive as possible, and express right emotions in order to foster viewers’ active attitudes and behaviors in communications and transactions. During the interactions, displaying organizational desired emotional expressions and suppressing others are very important for live streamers who interact with customers to promote their product. Such psychological regulation process of employees during service delivery is characterized as emotional labor (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Grandey, 2003; Hochschild, 1983). It can be achieved either while live streamers alter inner true feelings to match the required emotions of the work (deep acting), or while they fake the required emotional expressions (surface acting) (Grandey, 2000, 2003). Several meta-analyses have shown that deep acting is more likely to be linked with positive outcomes on employees, customers and organizations, but surface acting has a negative impact on the above outcomes (Chen et al., 2021; Fang et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2020). Therefore, how to address live streamers’ emotional labor issues and hereby improve corporate performance will be important in the theoretical and practical domain.
The recent studies have adopted the conservation of resources (COR) theory to explore the individual and organizational antecedents of emotional labor (Wen et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2020). According to the COR theory, individuals often tend to conserve and gain available resources and try to avoid threats that may result in exhaustion of resources (Hobfoll, 1989). And resources are further divided into external resource that individuals hope to gain (e.g., social support) and internal resources (e.g., objects, time, knowledge, motivation, personal characteristics or inner energy) (Hobfoll, 2001). While they lose internal resources or fail to gain external resources outside, they would experience stress or emotional exhaustion which prompts them to take action to conserve resources by changing their emotional labors. Social support is among the most important antecedents that have been investigated in recent years (Lam & Chen, 2012). Usually, the organizations are trying to provide various supports that enable the frontline employees to cope with stress (Hwa, 2012; Lam & Chen, 2012; Moon et al., 2013). Social support from organization, coworker, supervisor, family and etc. is regarded as a kind of external resource, which can supplement an individual’s inner energies by producing positive affective perceptions (Lam & Chen, 2012; Moon et al., 2013; Wen et al., 2019). However, the findings in existing studies has indicated that the relationship between social support and emotional labor strategies is complex and inconsistent (Xu et al., 2020). And more importantly, those studies provide little evidence on how and why social support can impact emotional labor strategies. Therefore, there is a need to understand how social support relates to different emotional labor strategies (e.g., surface acting and deep acting), including mediating and moderation effects that explain this relationship.