Emotional Labor Performance Research Articles

Emotion metaphors and emotional labor in science teaching

AbstractAn understanding of the importance of metaphors and beliefs in the development of teachers' practical knowledge has already been explored in science education research. However, the significance of emotion metaphors and the consequences of emotional labor as part of being a science teacher have been little addressed. This study describes the findings from a 3‐year ethnographic case study of an elementary‐school teacher who participated in a research project investigating the role of teacher emotion in science teaching and student learning. This research demonstrates how the performance of emotional labor is an important aspect of reality in science teaching. The teacher in this study is willing to do the emotional labor that involves some suffering because the emotional rewards are gratifying. A perspective on emotion in science education may focus, at least in part, on the functions of emotion in creating inspiring emotional cultures in science teaching and learning. Recognizing that teachers and students are agents in constructing such cultures, educators, teachers, and administrators are more likely to grasp the complexities and possibilities of emotional labor in the context of science education. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 88:301–324, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/.sce10116

Emotional Labor

The occupational experience of workers in service-oriented jobs can have profound effects on their health and well being, such as burnout, inauthenticity, and job dissatisfaction. The growing service economy and resultant proliferation of service-oriented jobs in current times and in the future must be acknowledged and investigated. The move from an economy driven by manufacturing industries to one dominated by service industries has taken place and currently prevails in the United States. In recognizing this shift in the "work" experience of the American work force, the changing nature of work related hazards must also be considered. Emotional labor has come to be known as an appreciable aspect of work involving direct interactions with clients and customers that can lead to adverse psychosocial outcomes. These relationships reveal the potential unpleasantness of service employment in which the performance of emotional labor is unavoidable. Although worker attributes can influence the emotional experience on the job, emotional labor is also likely to threaten the well being of workers through significantly high demands to express organizationally desired emotions and low control over what emotions can be felt and displayed. Recognition and investigation of emotional labor is necessary to understand its effects on worker populations. Conceptual models featuring emotional labor are available to guide research. However, discrimination among them based on utility and application in relation to identified study objectives and needs is essential.

Networking Capitalism: Network Construction and Control Effects In Direct Selling

Drawing on a qualitative study of direct selling in Taiwan, this article examines the process of network construction and its control effects over distributors. I found that weak ties, rather than strong ties, constitute major networks for distributors to expand their business. In order to consolidate trust within weak ties, distributors develop two major strategies: personalizing sales and familiarizing sponsorship. They are engaged in a multilevel performance of emotional labor in facing the audience of customers and fellow distributors. Social networks not only function as a facilitator of economic exchange but also become a means of labor control that permeates both public and private lives of distributors.

The Consequences of Emotional Labor: Effects on Work Stress, Job Satisfaction, and Well-Being

Although early research suggested that the performance of emotional labor had deleterious effects on workers, recent empirical investigations have been equivocal. The performance of emotional labor appears to have diverse consequences for workers—both negative and positive. Variation in the consequences of emotional labor may be due to the different forms of emotion management involved. There is also evidence that the effects of emotional labor are specified by other work conditions. The effects of two forms of emotional labor on work stress, job satisfaction, and psychological distress—self-focused and other-focused emotion management—are explored using data from a survey of workers in a large organization. Results indicate that both forms of emotional labor have uniformly negative effects on workers, net of work complexity, control, and demands. Emotional labor increases perceptions of job stress, decreases satisfaction, and increases distress. Self-focused emotion management has the most pervasive and detrimental impacts. There is little evidence of interaction effects of work conditions and emotional labor.

The Affective Consequences of Service Work

Understanding the social-psychology effects of frontline service work requires attention to the emotional labor performed by incumbents of these positions. Using Hochschild's 1983 classification of jobs requiring emotional labor, this study examines the effects of emotional labor on workers employed in the banking and hospital industries. The results suggest that performance of emotional labor does not have uniformly negative consequences for workers, as some accounts imply. Instead, the effects of emotional labor are conditioned by workers' level of job autonomy and job involvement, and their self-monitoring abilities. The conditions under which emotional labor has negative and positive social-psychological consequences are discussed.