Where does emotional labor collide?

The management of one's own feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display that an employer buys and sells for a wage. Hochschild coined the term in her 1983 book The Managed Heart, studying flight attendants and bill collectors, and set it apart from what she called emotion work, the same effort done privately in family and friendship where it has use value but no price. The claim is that when a smile becomes part of the job, the worker's feelings are turned into a commodity, sometimes at a cost to the self. This is the origin of the idea, and the three later models below rename and re-measure the same thing rather than describing separate constructs.[1]

Unit

A worker's feeling managed to meet a paid display rule

Recovery means

Restoration of a private, unmanaged emotional life away from the job

Measured by

Originally by ethnography and interview; display rules and felt costs read from workers' accounts

The act of displaying the emotion that a role requires, treated as observable behavior rather than as inner feeling. Ashforth and Humphrey's 1993 Emotional Labor in Service Roles deliberately moved the focus from Hochschild's management of feeling to the conforming behavior itself, arguing that what an organization can see and reward is the display, and that a worker can produce the expected display with or without any matching inner state. The construct here is the same job demand Hochschild named, but defined by its outward performance and its fit to display rules. It is not a different thing from the managed heart; it is the managed heart described from the outside.[2]

Unit

A single role-appropriate emotional display

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By observation and by ratings of conformity to a role's display rules

The effort, planning, and control needed to express organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions. Morris and Feldman's 1996 The Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences of Emotional Labor broke the construct into four measurable parts: how often such displays are required, how much attentiveness they demand in intensity and duration, how varied the required emotions are, and how much dissonance there is between what is felt and what must be shown. The point was to turn Hochschild's idea into something a survey could scale. The four dimensions are ways of quantifying the same job demand the earlier writers named, not four separate constructs, and the last of them, dissonance, is what most later work kept.[3]

Unit

The graded effort of a required emotional expression

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By self-report scales of frequency, attentiveness, variety, and emotional dissonance

Emotional labor recast as emotion regulation: the two strategies a worker uses to meet a display rule. Grandey's 2000 Emotion regulation in the workplace borrowed Gross's model of regulating emotion and split the work into surface acting, changing the shown emotion without changing the felt one, and deep acting, working on the felt emotion so it matches what is required. This became the dominant way the field measures the construct, because the two strategies have different costs, with surface acting the more draining. It is the same phenomenon Hochschild described, now stated as a regulation process and operationalized as two factors, which is why studies using it are studying emotional labor under a newer name.[4]

Unit

A worker's regulation strategy for a required display

Recovery means

Recovery from strain is easier after deep acting than after surface acting

Measured by

By surface-acting and deep-acting subscales in self-report emotional-labor inventories