Navigating the tightrope:The art of balancing for better performance

Effective supervisory mechanisms enable both monitoring and regulation of employee behavior, ensuring behavioral compliance and performance stability. However, continuous supervision can increase employees’ psychological arousal, especially evident in the face of emergencies. To avoid revealing stress, employees may resort to emotional labor to meet organizational demands. However, in emergencies, this may prevent them from forming psychological expectations, leading to delayed responses and, consequently, accelerating performance decline. This study explores the mechanism by which individuals’ psychological expectations influence their task performance under contingencies, the moderating effect of organizational supervision on this relationship, and the boundary conditions of its moderating effect. The results show that psychological arousal mediates the relationship between psychological expectation and task performance, with dynamic changes in arousal playing a crucial role in determining task performance. Organizational supervision strengthens the positive impact of psychological expectation on task performance; however, employees’ surface acting limits its effectiveness. Interestingly, the impact of deep acting on the moderating effect of organizational supervision differs significantly from that of surface acting. Deep acting effectively alleviates the imbalance in employees’ emotional states, improving the effectiveness of organizational supervision. Therefore, organizational supervision is not always effective, and better supervisory results and higher performance can only be achieved when the intensity of supervision aligns with employees’ emotional labor strategies. The findings of this paper provide insights for enterprises to optimize supervisory mechanisms and performance management.