Mask Effect in Public Service: A Perspective of Emotional Labor
Irving Yi-Feng Huang*
Abstract
“Serving the people” is the basic requirement for civil servants in modern society. It's the minimum standard to promote government performance which demands the civil service to possess the attitude of servants to provide services to the citizens. But, the tradition to treat the government employees as officers is still prevailing among the civil service. The civil servants will show a friendly mask for serving the citizens but keep an unhappy face of disliking rude and “ungovernable” people. In the long run, this kind of conflict will cause some problems for the civil servants and will ruin the organizational performance.
An on-line questionnaire survey was conducted to collect the data from street-level civil servants in New Taipei City. The findings indicate the “mask effect” has significant influence on job satisfaction and intention of turnover. It's important for the Human Resource agency to design and provide necessary training to reduce the conflict for civil servants.
Keywords: emotional labor, mask effect
* Associate Professor, Department of Public Administration, Tamkang University. email: irving@mail.tku.edu.tw.