Service employees can engage in surface acting to exaggerate positive emotions and suppress negative emotions during service interactions. However, surface acting not only depletes employees’ resources at work, but also spills over to the home domain. Drawing on the Conservation of Resources theory and the Effort-Recovery model, we investigate whether certain home activities (i.e., household and low-effort activities) can protect or replenish the resources exhausted by daily surface acting and if employees’ family identity and family support can facilitate the resource protection/replenishment processes. We employed the experience sampling method to collect twice per day from 212 service employees across 10 working days, yielding 1854 valid daily responses. The results showed that when service employees experience a need for recovery due to their daily surface acting, they reduce next-day surface acting by: (a) avoiding household activities and this indirect effect is stronger for employees with high family identity, and (b) engaging in more low-effort activities when service employees receive high support from their family members. Overall, our findings highlight that service employees can break the negative spiral of surface acting by avoiding household or performing low-effort activities as well as the buffering roles of family identity and support.
