Emotional labor

About: Emotional labor is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3948 publications have been published within this topic receiving 112110 citations. The topic is also known as: emotional labour.

Contesting the dominance of emotional labour in professional nursing.

Abstract: Purpose – The main intension of this paper is to challenge the dominance of emotional labour in professional nursing.Design/methodology/approach – The article begins by evaluating the central conceptual and definitional aspects of emotional labour, emotion work and emotional work. The purpose of this discussion is to argue against the false public and private dichotomy that has plagued emotional labour and emotion work. Second, it is proposed that the central and helpful defining aspects of emotional labour and emotion work are Marx's concepts of exchange‐value and use‐value. These defining attributes are used in conjunction with other re‐conceptualisations, which unite these terms in order to create more encompassing constructs that are useful for focusing on the waged and unwaged aspects of professional nurses' emotional work response behaviours. Finally, the use of emotional labour in professional nursing is contested on the grounds that the construct has limited theoretical and empirical utility for r...

Emotional Labor: Why and How to Teach It

Abstract: Feedback from graduates often indicates that their training failed to adequately prepare them for the human processes involved in the administration and delivery of public services. Although provided with training in cognitive skills, they are left on their own to acquire an appreciation for, and to develop skill in, nuanced emotive skills. This is especially the case for graduates who work in service-delivery programs that are emotionally intense, such as disaster services, child protective services, domestic violence, emergency medical services, corrections, and law enforcement. To a lesser degree, it is the case for all programs that provide person-to-person services. This paper discusses why these skills are important, how they are referred to in the proposed National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration Standards 2009, and explains how they can be incorporated into a curriculum.

The Development of the Teacher Emotional Labor Scale (TELS): Validity and Reliability.

Abstract: The current study had two main purposes. The first was to develop and validate an instrument to measure emotional labor among teachers (Teacher Emotional Labor Scale, TELS) with an emphasis on the emotion regulation strategies during critical work events. The second was to investigate whether emotional deviance could be considered as one of the emotional labor strategies. The developed 20-item self-report scale's validity and reliability was tested within high school teachers. The sample for this study consisted of 190 high school teachers working at various public schools in Mugla, Turkey (88 females and 102 males). The teachers were employed on a full-time basis and held no administrative position. The average work experience was 17.14 years (SD = 8.80). Confirmatory factor analysis results supported the four dimensional structure of emotional labor separating surface acting, deep acting, automatic emotion regulation, and emotional deviance in the current teacher sample. Results also provided initial evidence for the construct validity, criterion validity and internal consistency of the subscales (ranged from .70 to .81) of TELS. Key Words Emotional Labor, Surface Acting, Deep Acting, Automatic Emotion Regulation, Emotional Deviance, Education. Research from different theoretical and methodological perspectives has begun to investigate the important role of emotions in the workplace. One of the topics that emotion studies at work especially give attention is emotional labor. As sometimes called "emotional management" or "emotion work"; emotional labor has been conceptualized as multidimensional constructs reflecting various processes, such as emotional display rules (feelings rules), felt and expressed emotions at work (emotional dissonance), internal process and emotion regulation. The concept was first defined thoroughly by Hochschild (1983). She defines emotional labor as the regulation of employee's emotions to comply with occupational or organizational norms (emotional display rules). As she puts it "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display..." (p. 7). Since Hochschild's (1983) early conceptualization, several emotional labor studies have examined the nature, dimensions, antecedents, and outcomes of emotional labor (for reviews, Ashforth, & Humphrey, 1995; Brief, & Weiss, 2002; Cukur, & Sahin, 2007; Morris, & Feldman, 1996; Zapf, 2002). Early emotional labor studies have provided a rich and descriptive data on different aspects of emotional labor processes within various jobs and occupations through case studies and qualitative methods (Hastings, 2004; Hochschild, 1983; Martin, Knopoff, & Beckman, 1998; Nias, 1996; Rafaeli, & Sutton, 1991; Van Manen, & Kunda, 1989). Although these studies have played an import role in the theoretical development of emotional labor concepts and strategies, researchers have called for more systematic and quantitative methods to measure emotional labor, determine emotional labor dimensions, and examine the antecedents and consequences of emotional labor (Adelman, 1995; Ashforth, & Humphrey, 1995; Morris, & Feldman, 1996; Wharton, 1993). In this context, there have been several attempts to develop quantitative measures of emotional labor that have focused on different dimensions or strategies of emotional labor (Brotheridge, & Grandey, 2002; Brotheridge, & Lee, 2003; Diefendorff, Croyle, & Gosserand, 2005; Glomb, & Tews, 2004; Kruml, & Geddes, 2000; Morris, & Feldman, 1996). This study is part of these efforts. The main purpose of this study is to develop and validate an instrument to measure emotional labor. Unlike many of the previous emotional labor scales, the scale is solely designed to assess emotional labor among teachers (Teacher Emotional Labor Scale, TELS). TELS was developed to measure emotional labor that teachers perform for their students, coworkers, and supervisors. …

The emotional labour of caring about looked-after children

Abstract: Quality relationships form the backbone of social work with children and their families. They are particularly relevant in the close, intimate work with looked-after children who have identified how important it is to them that their relationship with their social worker is positive, warm and meaningful. It is accepted that in order to achieve and maintain successful and meaningful relationships, practitioners need to engage at an emotional as well as a professional level. All too often this requires a trade-off between organizational efficiency and the emotional work of caring for looked-after children. Therefore, it would appear the role of corporate parent is increasingly difficult, involving complex decisions about how practitioners might best spend their time, where their loyalties lie and the quality and direction of the final output. Using data from a series of interviews with practitioners, this paper explores the difficulties of maintaining active emotional engagement with children using the sociological concept of emotional labour.