Emotional Job Demands, Learning Goal Orientation, and 10-Year Changes in Sympathy

Abstract

Many contemporary jobs require emotional effort from employees to perform their job effectively. A large body of research on emotional labor has investigated the consequences of these emotional job demands (EJDs) on employees’ own emotions and well-being with mixed findings with regards to whether they are beneficial or harmful. Few studies, however, investigated the longitudinal effects of EJDs. Moreover, we lack a clear understanding whether EJDs facilitate or inhibit the development of employees’ emotional functioning such as the degree of sympathy they show toward others and which factors enhance or buffer this relationship. This study tests the effect of EJDs on changes in employees’ sympathy over a ten-year time period. Moreover, we investigate whether a learning goal orientation (LGO), the motivation for task mastery and self-improvement, buffers the potentially detrimental effects of EJDs on sympathy changes. We test these hypotheses using data from N = 831 working adults from the second and third wave of the Midlife in the United States survey (MIDUS) in combination with data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). Results from latent change score models show that whereas sympathy on average increases over the 10-year span, EJDs have a negative effect on these changes and a LGO moderates this effect so that EJDs have a negative effect on sympathy changes only for employees low in LGO. We discuss implications for theory and practice.