Emotional Labor and Burnout: Comparing Two Perspectives of “People Work”

doi:10.1006/jvbe.2001.1815

Journal of Vocational Behavior

Volume 60, Issue 1, February 2002, Pages 17-39

https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.2001.1815 Get rights and content

Abstract

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 employee-focused 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 the work 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 of work. These findings suggest new antecedents of employee burnout and clarify the emotional labor literature by comparing different conceptualizations of this concept.

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Regular ArticleEmotional Labor and Burnout: Comparing Two Perspectives of “People Work”

Abstract

Journal of Vocational Behavior

Journal of Vocational Behavior

Organizational Behavior and Human Performance

Journal of Vocational Behavior

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Journal of Vocational Behavior

Journal of Vocational Behavior

Emotional dissonance in organizations: Antecedents, consequences, and moderators

Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs

Negative affectivity: Moderator or confound in emotional dissonance–outcome relationships?

Journal of Psychology

Unlimited liability? Emotional labour in nursing and social work

Journal of Advanced Nursing

Emotional labor in service roles: The influence of identity

Academy of Management Review

Losing control: How and why people fail at self-regulation.

The service encounter: Diagnosing favorable and unfavorable incidents

Journal of Marketing

Should negative affectivity remain an unmeasured variable in the study of job stress?

Journal of Applied Psychology

Doing for others on the job: The affective requirements of service work, gender, and emotional well-being

Social Problems

The role of negative affectivity in understanding relations between self-reports of stressors and strains: A comment on the applied psychology literature

Journal of Applied Psychology

A longitudinal study of psychological burnout in teachers

Human Relations

Job satisfaction, propensity to leave, and burnout in RNs and RNAs: A multivariate perspective

Canadian Journal of Nursing Administration

Long-term consequences of burnout: An exploratory study

Journal of Organizational Behavior

A review and an integration of research on job burnout

Academy of Management Review

Patterns of burnout among managers and professionals: A comparison of models

Journal of Organizational Behavior

Unmasking the face

Inauthenticity and depression: Assessing the consequences of interactive service work

Work and Occupations

Emotional exhaustion in a high stress organization

Academy of Management Journal

Emotional labor: A concept and its correlates

Emotion regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor

Journal of Occupational Health Psychology

Antecedent- and response-focused emotion regulation: Divergent consequences for experience, expression, and physiology

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Hiding feelings: The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotions

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Distinguishing between service relationships and encounters

Journal of Applied Psychology

Internal service quality, customer and job satisfaction: Linkages and implications for management

Human Resource Planning

Caring: The raison d'etre of the professional nurse

Canadian Journal of Nursing Administration

Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure

American Journal of Sociology

The managed heart: The commercialization of human feeling

Regular Article
Emotional Labor and Burnout: Comparing Two Perspectives of “People Work”