Antecedents and Consequences of Emotional Labor : A Review

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to observe conceptualize emotional labor with antecedents and consequences. As part of

service job, Emotional labor means to express emotions while providing services to customers. Its outcome can be

beneficial for customers, employees and organizations, that’s why airlines want attendants to smile and act friendly

and hospitals want nurses to show concern and compassion towards their clients or customers etc. Emotional labor

exists among service providers and customer interaction to provide quality service and to get customer satisfaction.

This research describes that emotional labor has major two types, firstly surface acting (faking emotion), secondly

deep acting (try to modify inner feelings). First one is not harmful for employees in service job because it is

supposed to be in-line with organizational objectives. Second one can be harmful if it is not controlled by employees

because it can cause emotional conflicts among employees. Emotional Conflicts mean contradiction between

employees’ personal feelings and the feelings which organization desires. But in fact, deep acting is positively

related with organizational commitment, job satisfaction, customer satisfaction and job performance. Emotional

labor has four dimensions: frequency of appropriate emotional display, frequency of interactions, attentiveness to

display rules and variety of emotional expressions & emotional dissonance. These dimensions have their own

antecedents and consequences. This study investigates antecedents and consequences of emotional labor in

subsequent sections.