Emotional Labor Papers

consistent with the literature indicating that employees can experience burnout as a result of the congruence and discordance between their personal emotional states and occupational expectations

**Definition**: Emotional labor (EL) is the effort, planning and control needed to express organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions

Thus, it is a stressor factor but a necessary one in order for employees to regulate their feelings and expressions to **achieve organizational goals**

30% (Keller et al., 2014 / ESM study)

Teachers reported suppressing or faking their emotions during roughly a third of all lessons

The managed heart "COMMERCIALIZATION OF HUMAN FEELING"

• Sociology

• Surface Acting

• Deep Acting

Hochschild (1983) argued that both strategies are detrimental to the health of service employees. ==both strategies (SA/DA) are detrimental==

=> current research: ambigious about DA

• Hochschild was the first to note that, especially in service jobs, employees are often required to show certain emotions in order to please the customer.

According to Montgomery and Maslach [25];

- exhaustion is the individual stress dimension of burnout, and it refers to feelings of being physically overextended and depleted of one’s emotional resources;

- cynicism (or depersonalization) refers to a negative, callous, or excessively detached response to other people; and

- inefficacy (or lack of accomplishment) refers to a decline in one’s feelings of competence and successful achievement in one’s work.

Burnout has been linked with emotional and cognitive loss of control [26], as employees who suffer from burnout often experience difficulties in regulating their behavior, possibly due to executive control deficits [27,28].

Diminished executive control abilities could mediate the relationship between burnout and emotional labor. That is, burned-out teachers might be less able to apply strategies for regulating their emotions as a result of executive control deficits

e.g. empirical work:

• Philipp et al., 2010 / Longitudinal!

• Zaretsky et al., 2019

=> Few studies have examined burnout as the cause of emotional labor [8,15,36], and those that did have shown that burnout leads to greater surface acting strategies and emotional labor.

==whether burnout and emotional labor happen in parallel.==

Future researchers need to explore whether emotional labor is an ongoing coping strategy to deal with burnout rather than a cause or antecedent of burnout.

teachers who are more empathetic => more gratification from job --> less exhaustion

Wrobel et al. [9] observed that deep acting may be motivated by a high level of empathy

Näring et al., 2006: Beyond demand–control: Emotional labour and symptoms of burnout in teachers

Chang, 2013: Toward a theoretical model to understand teacher emotions and teacher burnout in the context of student misbehavior: Appraisal, regulation and coping

In their meta-analysis, Bono and Vey (2005) found that surface acting is positively correlated with emotional exhaustion and negatively correlated with job satisfaction.

Engaging in surface acting does not only require effort but is also accompanied by an ongoing emotional dissonance (state of discrepancy between the emotion felt and the emotion expressed), which is associated with increasing emotional exhaustion (e.g., Zapf, 2002), making surface acting a more deleterious strategy.

Counter findings

• Philipp et al. 2010: longitudinally no SA => EE

  • Yet, surface acting had no relevant long-term effect on emotional exhaustion and dedication. Different explanations are possible.

• Second, as Cˆote ́ and Morgan (2002) showed, the negative effect of surface acting may depend on whether a positive emotion is amplified or a negative emotion suppressed. ==very essential argument for==

Frenzel especially highlighted the reciprocal linkage between teacher emotions and four aspects in her model, namely:

1. student achievement behaviours and

2. student misbehaviours;

3. teachers’ relationships with students; and

4. instructional effectiveness.

Emotions are thought to be

• predictors of teacher behavior in class, in terms of effective instructional practices, as well as

• student behavior and

• student outcomes

1. cognitive activation

2. classroom management

3. student support

Key statement:

„Therefore, we suggest that emotional labor may be a “double-edged sword”. On the one hand, it could lead to teacher burnout and diminished occupational well-being. On the other hand, it could enhance student-perceived teaching quality.“ (Wang und Frenzel, 2025, p. 2)