EMOTIONAL LABOR FROM AN OCCUPATIONAL LENS

Abstract

The management and display of emotions has become a pervasive occupational role requirement for many workers in the service industry. Service workers’ interactions with clients or customers exposes them to occupational requirements where they must effectively display certain emotions, while at the same time internally suppressing other felt emotions—a type of work activity referred to by Arlie Hochschild (1983) as emotional labor. Despite a vast literature on the subject, there remain a number of knowledge gaps regarding the consequences of emotional labor. My dissertation addresses this issue by merging occupational-level data with a national survey dataset of American workers to examine a variety of consequences of emotional labor using a multidimensional approach. I reveal that emotional labor poses the greatest threat to well-being in resource deprived work contexts, and that occupations that have little job control are mostly occupied by minority women. I also find that high control beliefs serve as an important psychological resource for men that can buffer the strain that leads to customer/client conflict in emotional labor intensive occupations.