The link between emotional labor and employee performance in the services sector

Abstract

The lack of clarity related to the concept of emotional labor has impeded its development regardless of the conspicuous importance of emotional labor for the external and internal environments which include the employees, organizations, structure, operations, and clients. Thus, this research aims to highlight the connection between emotional labor and its impact on employee performance. This study is concerned with the employees in the services sector in the period between January 2011 and June 2022 and included a total of 21 articles. In general, this review found that emotional labor can result in positive results for the business, as enhancing workers’ satisfaction as well as performance, on the other hand, burnout and poor job performance when people are compelled to express emotions differently than their own, the findings were highlighting the consistent connection between surface acting (SA) and employee performance. Nonetheless, the findings of deep acting (DA) and the employee’s performance were blended (Çağlıyan et al., 2013; Alsakarneh et al., 2019). Searches were conducted using ProQuest, EBSCO, Emerald Insight, PsycINFO, Science Direct, and Google Scholar. The research team systematically reviewed each article and relative reports, eliminating those not relevant to the review.