Emotional display rules and emotional labor strategies are core constructs of emotional labor. How will employees regulate their emotions in response to emotional display rules? Based on the self-determination theory, this paper examined the impact of the explicitness of emotional display rules on emotional labor strategies and the mediation effect of autonomous motivation. The results show that the explicitness of display rules has an inverted U-shaped relationship on the deep acting level and a U-shaped relationship on the surface acting level. That is, when the explicitness of display rules is high and low, employees tend to adopt surface-level acting more than deep-level acting; when the explicitness of display rules is moderate, employees will adopt deep-level acting more than surface-level acting. Autonomous motivation partially mediates the relationship between the explicitness of display rules and deep-level acting, and completely mediates the relationship between the explicitness of display-level rules and surface-level acting.