Heart work for empowerment: how subordinate emotional labor influences leader empowering behavior

Purpose This study aims to examine how subordinates’ emotional labor strategies (deep acting versus surface acting) toward supervisors influence leader empowering behavior, with leader–member exchange (LMX) as a mediating mechanism and leader emotional intelligence as a moderating condition. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted two complementary studies. Study 1 used a scenario-based experiment (n = 222 hotel and restaurant managers) to establish causal relationships. Study 2 used a two-wave, multisource field survey (n = 229 supervisor-subordinate dyads in hotels and restaurants) to examine mediating and moderating mechanisms. Findings Deep acting (genuinely experiencing expected emotions) increases leader empowering behavior, whereas surface acting (feigning emotions) decreases it. LMX partially mediates both relationships, and leader emotional intelligence strengthens both effects. Practical implications Empowerment decisions should be based primarily on employees’ competence, performance and task readiness rather than emotional conformity. Organizations should develop employees’ emotion-regulation resources while training supervisors to distinguish emotional impressions from task-relevant evidence. Originality/value This study challenges the assumption that empowerment flows solely from leaders. The authors demonstrate that subordinates actively shape empowerment through emotional labor, with effects contingent on leader emotional intelligence. This reveals emotional labor as an LMX antecedent and shows that empowerment in hospitality organizations results from interactions between subordinate emotional capabilities and leader perceptual skills, not leader characteristics alone.