Emotional Labor: Regulating Emotions for a Wage

By Alicia A. Grandey, Gordon M. Sayre. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2019

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many employees perform emotional labor, regulating their emotions to meet organizationally mandated display rules (e.g., “service with a smile”), which has both professional and personal implications. Emotion regulation in a work context is important to enhance customers’ mood and service satisfaction, but putting on that smile to perform one’s work role can have surprising costs depending on how the emotions are regulated. When employees try to change their feelings to appear sincere (i.e., deep acting), performance is enhanced, yet employees must often “fake it” (i.e., surface act), which has consequences to their well-being. We discuss how these concepts are similar and distinct from emotion-regulation strategies while also reviewing work factors that help optimize emotional labor’s impact on performance and well-being. Finally, we note recent studies that have expanded the concept of emotional labor and the methods used to capture this workplace experience.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41c67b3ddf557cd9d15250d587cde98c1cbd4c31

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Citations in the corpus

Teacher emotional labour, instructional strategies, and students’ academic engagement: a multilevel analysis (2020, background): “…even though deep acting is generally effective for audience reactions, there is empirical evidence suggesting that, in the long term, it might actually lead to exhaustion and psychosomatic symptoms (Grandey & Sayre, 2019) and, therefore, have adverse consequences on organisational performance too.”