Healthcare service providers act on behalf of healthcare organizations to deliver the services promised to customers, while simultaneously serving as boundary spanners who build relationships with customers and communicate their needs back to the orga...
Healthcare service providers act on behalf of healthcare organizations to deliver the services promised to customers, while simultaneously serving as boundary spanners who build relationships with customers and communicate their needs back to the organization. In this role, providers significantly influence customers’ perceptions of service quality and organizational performance. Because healthcare service providers engage in emotional labor when interacting with customers, it is essential for healthcare organizations to establish organizational-level strategies to manage such emotional labor. Furthermore, it is necessary to examine how the personal dispositions of healthcare service providers affect their professional activities and overall job performance. This study aimed to examine how the organizational complexity of healthcare service organizations influences emotional labor through the job engagement of healthcare service providers. Furthermore, it examined the role of collectivism in healthcare service providers in the relationship between job engagement and emotional labor. To this end, a survey was conducted with healthcare service providers working at medium- to large-sized hospitals in Busan and Gyeongnam, collecting a total of 287 data for analysis. The results confirmed the hypotheses presented in this study, revealing that organizational complexity in healthcare service organizations reduces healthcare service providers' job engagement. While the impact of healthcare service providers' job engagement on surface acting, among emotional labor types, was not verified, it did have a positive effect on deep acting. Finally, the study confirmed that healthcare service providers' collectivism further strengthens the impact of job engagement on deep acting. Based on the findings of this study, several managerial implications were derived. Specifically, the study suggests that healthcare organizations should not only manage organizational complexity to prevent the reduction of providers’ deep acting behaviors, but also actively foster collectivist orientations among healthcare service providers. More concretely, organizations are encouraged to streamline and simplify work design processes and to implement policies or programs that facilitate smooth intra- and inter-departmental interactions. In addition, to strengthen collectivist tendencies among providers, organizations should prioritize the recruitment of applicants with high collectivist orientations and develop training programs aimed at enhancing collectivist values among existing healthcare service providers.