Abstract
Alcohol use is costly for individual health and organizational competitiveness and is prevalent in jobs where employees regulate their emotions. While this suggests a link between emotional labour and alcohol consumption, prior work adopting a self‐control lens has found mixed results. We clarify this relationship by considering drinking not only as a failure of self‐control but also as a motivational strategy to cope with unpleasant feelings. Specifically, we integrate the social interaction model and the motivational model of alcohol use to propose that daily surface acting predicts greater felt inauthenticity by employees. Employees who feel inauthentic will be motivated to drink more as a means of coping with this negative internal state. This should be especially true when they hold positive beliefs about the tension–reduction capabilities of alcohol. We test our model across two experience sampling studies of customer service workers, examining our proposed mediators while also controlling for depletion as an alternative mechanism. Results confirm our hypotheses and highlight the importance of considering the underlying motivations for why people drink. These findings also advance the emotional labour literature by pointing to inauthenticity as an important but often ignored social mechanism connecting surface acting with a critical health behaviour.