Due to the rapid growth in social service today, the service rendered by social workers and how it was delivered affects the clients and their satisfaction, which has direct influence on the social welfare institutions'' accomplishment-making. Thus, social workers are to perform their duty based on the strict guideline drawn by the social welfare institution which demands them to be at the best behavior and suppress emotion in order to enhance client satisfaction.
In particular, as the clients''s needs are diversified according to the changing environment of social service, discussion on the social workers'' emotion and emotional labor is getting more heated.
The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of emotional labor on the customer orientation of social workers with case management and the moderating effect of emotional intelligence and LMX(Leader-Member Exchange) in order to provide basic data for the effective human resources management plan and appropriate emotional labor management practices of social workers with case management. In this study, emotional labor that are transformational surfacing acting, deep acting is independent variable. Emotional intelligence and LMX are moderate variable and customer orientation is dependent variable. For this study, the structured self-administered questionnaires were distributed to 295 social workers with case management in 107 social welfare institutions in Busan Metropolitan City area. A total of 291 responses out of 295 collected were analyzed. IBM SPSS Statistics version 22.0 was used to perform frequency analysis, factor analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis and moderating effect regression analysis and SPSS Macro(Baron & Kenny, 1986).
The major results from the study are as follows. First, the result of the effect analysis with using the multi-regression analysis showed that the more affected factor of emotional labor to customer orientation was deep acting and next order was surfacing acting and it found that the deep acting of emotional labor affects positively on the customer orientation, while the surfacing acting affects negatively.
Second, emotional intelligence had no moderating effect on the correlation between deep acting of emotional labor and customer orientation, but it showed a moderating effect on the correlation between surfacing acting of emotional labor and customer orientation. Also, the result of verifying the moderating effect using SPSS Macro showed that the moderating effect was existed on the correlation between surfacing acting of emotional labor and orientation. In the moderating effect graph, emotional intelligence had the moderating effect of weakening the negative impact surfacing acting effect on customer orientation.
Third, LMX had no moderating effect on the correlation between surfacing acting of emotional labor and customer orientation, but it showed a moderating effect on the correlation between deep acting of emotional labor and customer orientation. Also, the result of verifying the moderating effect using SPSS Macro showed that the moderating effect was existed on the correlation between deep acting of emotional labor and orientation. In the moderating effect graph, LMX had the moderating effect of strengthening the positive impact deep acting effect on customer orientation.
Overall, these findings indicate that the emotional labor affected social workers with case management''s customer orientation, that emotional intelligence had a moderating effect on the correlation between surfacing acting of emotional labor and customer orientation, that LMX had a moderating effect on the correlation between deep acting of emotional labor and customer orientation and customer. Also, emotional intelligence had the moderating effect of weakening the negative impact surfacing acting effect on customer orientation and LMX had the moderating effect of strengthening the positive impact deep acting effect on customer orientation. This suggests that social workers'' emotional labor and emotional intelligence, LMX should be managed in an effective and appropriate way in order to improve the customer orientation of social workers with case management.


Keywords : Social worker with case management, Emotional labor, Customer orientation, Emotional intelligence, LMX(Leader-Memeber Exchange), SPSS Macro, Moderating effect graph