Antecedents of workplace emotional labor dimensions and moderators of their effects on physical symptoms

The present study distinguished between two modal emotional display rules, demands to express positive efference and demands to suppress negative efference, that partially constitute the work roles of many employees. Perceived demands to express positive emotion were positively related to health symptoms primarily among those reporting: (1) lower identification with the organization; (2) lower job involvement; and (3) lower emotional adaptability. The effects of various personality traits and situational variables on perceived emotional labor differed depending on the nature of the emotional labor. The findings are discussed in terms of implications of emotional labor for health and practices through which organizations might intervene to minimize its unhealthful consequences among employees. We also attempt to reconcile the findings with some of the related research in psychology suggesting that some forms of required efference may have salutary physiological consequences. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[1]  Daniel C. Feldman,et al.  Managing emotions in the workplace. , 1997 .

[2]  Anat Rafaeli,et al.  Expression of Emotion as Part of the Work Role , 1987 .

[3]  Robert I. Sutton,et al.  Maintaining Norms about Expressed Emotions: The Case of Bill Collectors , 1991 .

[4]  R. I. Sutton,et al.  Untangling the Relationship between Displayed Emotions and Organizational Sales: The Case of Convenience Stores , 1988 .

[5]  A. Hochschild.  Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure , 1979, American Journal of Sociology.

[6]  A. Wharton,et al.  The Affective Consequences of Service Work , 1993 .

[7]  Blake E. Ashforth,et al.  Emotional Labor in Service Roles: The Influence of Identity , 1993 .

[8]  C. Notarius,et al.  Multichannel responses to an interpersonal stressor: Interrelationships among facial display, heart rate, self-report of emotion, and threat appraisal. , 1982 .

[9]  C. Izard.  The face of emotion , 1971 .

[10]  D. Ganster,et al.  Work Stress and Employee Health , 1991 .

[11]  D. Watson,et al.  Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[12]  P. Ekman.  Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. , 1972 .

[13]  L. King,et al.  Conflict over emotional expression: psychological and physical correlates. , 1990, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[14]  D. Watson,et al.  Negative affectivity: the disposition to experience aversive emotional states. , 1984, Psychological bulletin.

[15]  R. Zajonc,et al.  Facial efference and the experience of emotion. , 1989, Annual review of psychology.

[16]  C. Notarius,et al.  Expressive tendencies and physiological response to stress. , 1979, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[17]  Daniel C. Feldman,et al.  The Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences of Emotional Labor , 1996 .

[18]  A. Wharton,et al.  MANAGING EMOTIONS ON THE JOB AND AT HOME: UNDERSTANDING THE CONSEQUENCES OF MULTIPLE EMOTIONAL ROLES , 1993 .

[19]  J. Laird,et al.  Individual differences in self-attribution of emotion. , 1974 .

[20]  M J Burke,et al.  Should negative affectivity remain an unmeasured variable in the study of job stress? , 1988, The Journal of applied psychology.

[21]  J. Tropman,et al.  The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling , 1984 .

[22]  Sheldon Cohen,et al.  Health psychology: psychological factors and physical disease from the perspective of human psychoneuroimmunology. , 1996, Annual review of psychology.