Injustice and Task Performance in the Ridesharing Context: Examining the Role of Emotions and Emotion Regulation

Xue Lei

Advisor: Seth Kaplan, PhD, Department of Psychology

Committee Members: Yi-Ching Lee, Kevin Rockmann

David J. King Hall, #2038
April 16, 2020, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Abstract:

The customer rating system in online platform-mediated gig work provides customers with much power. This likely induces a high degree of emotional labor in gig workers, especially with the occurrence of injustice. Inability to regulate emotions in this scenario can lead to severe outcomes like road accidents in the gig driving context. Despite the importance of this issue, previous literature has mainly focused on studying the emotional labor of full-time service workers in traditional organizations. In the present study, a lab simulation design was developed to mimic the driver-passenger interaction in the ridesharing industry using a driving simulator. The level of different forms of injustice (interpersonal, distributive, informational) was manipulated to investigate their effects on gig drivers’ emotional experience and task performance. Results confirmed that injustice events generally led to negative emotions. However, different injustice feelings produced distinct impacts on task performance. Interpersonal injustice had harmful impacts whereas perceived unfairness of the rating (mainly caused by distributive injustice) had an unexpected motivating effect on the performance in the next ride. Antecedent-focused or cognitive change emotion regulation strategies were an effective way to reduce negative emotions and enhance task performance.