The management of emotional labor is often overlooked and under researched due to its intangible and unmeasurable nature; however, e-smile service may offer a new opportunity for its management. We aim to explore the impact of pay-for-performance on emotional labor management in e-smile service, drawing on self-determination theory, and develop a moderated mediation model with perceived insider status (PIS) as the moderator and work performance as the outcome variable. We collected two-wave data from 387 online customer agents from travel agencies on Chinese online travel platforms and used structural equation modeling with Mplus 7.4 to analyze the hypotheses. Results indicate that (a) pay-for-performance enhances both deep and surface acting in e-smile service; (b) deep acting has a positive effect on both task performance and perceived customer service performance, while surface acting only affects task performance; and (c) PIS weakens the mediation of surface acting between pay-for-performance and task performance. We advance the research on emotional labor motivation by exploring features of e-smile service and pay-for-performance, contribute to bridging the gap between emotional labor and performance outcomes by applying self-determination theory, and enrich the connotation and application fields of emotional labor. The findings provide practical insights for improving the quality and effectiveness of e-smile services in the tourism industry.
