Leading with emotional labour: the interplay of six emotions

Abstract

This study explores how emotional labour is performed by leaders to enhance employee task completion. More specifically, the study examines how one particular leader enacted emotional labour by expressing various emotions in real-life interactions that were recorded during an 11-minute conversation with employees. The data for the study were collected from a videotaped office meeting that took place in a small service company. A detailed micro-analysis of a series of vignettes from the meeting provides new evidence of the dynamic nature of emotional labour in an everyday leadership situation, enhancing the research literature on emotional labour performed by Humphrey (2008), Humphrey et al. (2008) and Iszatt-White (2013b).