Abstract
Past investigations have demonstrated the important role of emotions in the workplace. The present research focuses on frontline employees and on how the relation between their perceptions of customers? mood and job satisfaction can be moderated by their levels of emotional contagion. A comparative case study was conducted with two conditions of service encounters: face-to-face and telephone. The results show that for both conditions there is a positive and significant correlation between perceptions of customers? mood and job satisfaction. Only for the face to face group this relation was moderated by employees? propensity for emotional contagion. The author suggests that where all the sources of emotional contagion are present (proxemics, kinesics, and paralinguistic) the emotional contagion scale created by Doherty (1997) could and should be used as a recruitment tool. For the job environments where employees are not exposed to the visual sources, more research is still needed to understand how the contagion process takes place.