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.

Client Contact and Emotional Labor Upsetting the Balance and Evening the Field

Abstract: This article examines the effect of client contact on the emotional labor performed by paralegals employed in both consumer- and commercial-oriented law firms. Consumer-oriented law refers to specialties that deal primarily with the interests of corporations. The consumer-oriented paralegals in this study identified three themes in their interactions with clients that increased their likelihood of engaging in emotional labor: the clients' emotional states, clients' lack of knowledge regarding legal proceedings, and their own roles as organizational buffers. Whereas consumer-oriented paralegals are held to a higher standard of emotional labor performed for the benefit of clients, their increased level of substantive involvement may, in fact, release them from the emotional labor that commercial-oriented paralegals are required to perform for the benefit of attorneys.

Emotion, moral perception, and nursing practice

Abstract: Many of the activities of clinical practice happen to, with or upon vulnerable human beings. For this reason numerous nursing authors draw attention to or claim a significant moral domain in clinical practice. A number of nursing authors also discuss the emotional involvement and/or emotional labour which is often experienced in clinical practice. In this article I explore the importance of emotion for moral perception and moral agency. I suggest that an aspect of being a good nurse is having an emotional sensitivity to other human beings (patients), because this emotional sensitivity allows the nurse to perceive more accurately the context and perspective of the patient. It is thus important to the moral agency of the nurse and to morally sensitive clinical practice. As such education of the emotions should be a feature of the moral education of the nurse. A useful conception of the role of educated emotion in the moral life can be discovered in Aristotelian ethics.

The Labor of Pleasure How Perceptions of Emotional Labor Impact Women's Enjoyment of Pornography

Abstract: Propornography and antipornography literatures have failed to elucidate the complexity of women's consumption of pornography. This article submits that a reconstructed theory of emotional labor, developed from the perspective of the consumer, explains some of women's ambivalence toward pornography. Findings are based on interviews with 30 women who enjoy porn films. The women's ambivalence reflected their perception of emotional labor in pornographic production. Although they found pornography arousing, they faced uncertainty over the authenticity of the porn actresses' pleasure. Furthermore, they perceived emotional authenticity through the lens of their personal biographies. Specifically, their economic backgrounds and experiences with sexual coercion are discussed. This study fills two gaps: (1) By linking the production and consumption of pornography, it enables a deeper exploration of women's ambivalence and the subsequent implications for understanding sexuality, and (2) it features the experiences ...

Does Servant Leadership Affect Employees’ Emotional Labor? A Social Information-Processing Perspective

Abstract: Emotion management in the workplace is drawing increasing attention from researchers. However, they still know little about how positive leadership affects employees’ emotional labor. Building on social information-processing theory, we examine whether and how a servant leadership style influences employees’ emotional labor. Using a sample of 305 employees in 81 work units of 25 subcorporations at a food company in China, we find that servant leadership relates negatively to surface acting (i.e., regulating facial expressions) but relates positively to deep acting (i.e., regulating inner feelings) at work. We also find that the indirect effect of servant leadership on surface/deep acting via affective trust is stronger than the indirect effect via cognitive trust. Our research reveals that servant leadership influences employees’ emotional labor more through affective trust than cognitive trust. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

A multi-level view of leadership and emotions: Leading with emotional labor

Abstract: The idea that emotions play an important role in management and leadership is not really all that new. Mastenbroek (2000), for example, detailed how emotion has been a central feature of organizational management for over 2000 years. In the leadership literature, Redl (1942) was the first to report on the powerful effect of leaders on the emotional makeup of work groups; and emotions are featured in the early theories of leadership and management. For example, Fayol (1916/1949) noted that leaders needed to understand all aspects of their subordinates psyche, including their emotional states. More recently, Weiss and Brief (2001) detailed how emotions at work figured prominently in the early theories of organizational behavior. Today, most theories of leadership, especially charismatic and transformational leadership, have become inherently emotional (e.g., see Shamir & Howell, 1999, on charismatic leadership; and Ashkanasy & Tse, 2000, on transformational leadership). Despite this, and as Ashkanasy and Jordan (2008) recently observed, leadership scholars have in general been slow to develop broadly-based theories of leadership that incorporate an emotional dimension. In fact, it was not until 1995 that interest in emotions and leadership began to receive mainstream attention. This was the year Ashforth and Humphrey (1995) published ‘Emotion in the workplace: a reappraisal.’ Also published in the same year was the best-selling book by Goleman (1995), Emotional intelligence: why it can matter more than IQ. The problem at that point in time, however, continued to be lack of a theoretical foundation for incorporating emotional dimensions into the prevailing theories of leadership. For example, Yukl (1999) noted that contemporary theories of charismatic and transformational leadership tended to focus on dyadic relationships, rather than trying to understand interpersonal processes such as emotion. This position began to change rapidly in the early years of the 2000s, with the appearance of theoretical models by Ashkanasy and Tse (2000), Barbuto and Burbach (2006), Caruso, Mayer and Salovey (2002), and George (2000). These were followed by a string of empirical studies, especially focusing on the role of emotional intelligence (e.g., see Gardner & Stough, 2002; Wolff, Pescosolido, & Druskat, 2002; Wong & Law, 2002), culminating in a Special Issue of The Leadership Quarterly, guest-edited by Humphrey (2002). Despite this progress, and as Ashkanasy and Jordan (2008) pointed out, the existing theories of leadership continue to emphasize isolated individual characteristics such as emotional intelligence. Ashkanasy and Jordan recommended that scholars need to broaden their perspective to include the influence of leadership at all levels of