The Consequences of Emotional Labor for Public Sector Workers and the Mitigating Role of Self-Efficacy

Abstract

Emotional labor that requires workers to suppress their truly felt emotions and create a fake emotional display has negative consequences for workers including psychological distress and lowered job satisfaction. This type of emotional labor, called surface acting, is often necessary in public service work. In an effort to identify ways to reduce the harmful effects of emotional labor for workers, this research further specifies the relationship between emotional labor and worker well-being using data from a large sample of public service workers working in a variety of occupations ( n = 1,395). The analyses test a mediator and moderators of the relationship between emotional labor and worker well-being. The findings suggest that surface acting emotional labor is harmful to workers because it increases feelings of self-estrangement. In addition, a worker’s sense of self-efficacy in emotional labor performance is shown to reduce the negative effects of surface acting.