Although it has often been presumed that jobs involving “people
work” (e.g., nurses, service workers) are emotionally taxing
(Maslach & Jackson, 1982), seldom is the emotional component of
these jobs explicitly studied. The current study compared two
perspectives of emotional labor as predictors of burnout beyond the
effects of negative affectivity: job-focused emotional labor (work
demands regarding emotion expression) and employeefocused emotional
labor (regulation of feelings and emotional expression).
Significant differences existed in the emotional demands reported
by five occupational groupings. The use of surface-level emotional
labor, or faking, predicted depersonalization beyond thework
demands. Perceiving the demand to display positive emotions and
using deep-level regulation were associated with a heightened sense
of personal accomplishment, suggesting positive benefits to this
aspect ofwork. These findings suggest newantecedents of employee
burnout and clarify the emotional labor literature by comparing
different conceptualizations of this concept.
238 full-time Canadian employees ; convenience sample, recruited
through undergraduate business students who received a small sum of
money for their assistance in recruitment ; sampling of
occupational type consistedof human service workers (29),
service/sales employees (143), managers (15), clerical staff (22),
and physical laborers (29) //////////// First, we compared the
emotional demands and levels of emotional control perceived by
employees in two forms of “people work” and three other
occupational categories. Second, we assessed the operationalization
of emotional labor as work requirements by assessing the
relationship of job demands and emotional control with the three
burnout dimensions. Third, we tested the additive value of
operationalizing emotional labor as the employees’ process of
modifying emotions and emotional expressions.
employees in “people work” did not report significantly higher
levels of emotional exhaustion than did respondents employed in
other occupations ; Service/sales employees reported the highest
overall mean ; Human service workers reported significantly lower
levels of depersonalization and higher levels of personal
accomplishment ; employees who experience a level of success in
their work are more likely to invest in their performance ;
physical laborers reported higher levels of depersonalization and
diminished personal accomplishment relative to human service
workers ; surface acting was significantly related to emotional
exhaustion ; only sincere expressions have beneficial outcomes for
employees
The different sample sizes for each occupational group ; study was
cross-sectional, so the direction of causality cannot be tested ;
study did not include variables currently known to predict burnout
longitudinal studies to test the causal direction ; examine the
contribution of emotion regulation processes in predicting burnout
over and above previously tested predictors such as role stressors
Emotional differences in the nature of “people work” ; results
discourage the use of frequency of contact as the main predictor of
emotional exhaustion ; emotional demands and emotion management
styles can create positive outcomes, not just stress
