What Three Decades of Research Say About Faking It At Work
Pooling 95 studies, researchers found that surface acting, faking or suppressing emotions to meet a job's expectations, was substantially linked to poorer wellbeing and worse job attitudes, while deep acting, genuinely trying to feel the required emotion, showed weak links to harm and was instead linked to better customer outcomes.
Depletion, Sustainable Performance
This meta-analysis pooled 95 independent studies and nearly 500 individual statistical relationships to settle a genuinely important distinction in the research on managing emotions at work: does it matter how you do it? Surface acting, outwardly displaying an emotion you don't actually feel, showed a substantial, consistent relationship with impaired wellbeing and worse job attitudes across the pooled data. Deep acting, genuinely working to feel the emotion the role requires rather than just performing it, showed only weak links to any harm, and was instead positively associated with better emotional performance and higher customer satisfaction.
As a meta-analysis of correlational studies, it can't establish that surface acting directly causes the wellbeing harms rather than, say, people already struggling being more likely to fall back on surface acting. Its real contribution is precision: 'managing your emotions at work is exhausting' turns out to be true specifically for the faking version, not for the genuine effort to actually feel differently, a distinction with real implications for how emotionally demanding roles might be designed and supported.
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