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The Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences of Emotional Labor
The Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences of Emotional Labor
986
1996 Morris and FeJdnjan 987
the display of more intense (sincere) emotions (Rafaeli, 1989b). Thus, clients
do not expect emotional intensity in short scripted interactions with tele-
marketers, but they do expect more intense exchanges in longer, non-
scripted interactions with nurses. Moreover, Frijda and colleagues (1992)
also noted that displays of intense emotion are more likely to occur when
participants in the transactions have some history to their exchanges;
interactions of longer duration are more likely to provide that history.
Variety of Emotions Required To Be Expressed
The third major dimension of emotional labor is the variety of emo-
tional displays required by work roles. The greater the variety of emotions
to be displayed, the greater the emotional labor of role occupants will be.
Service providers who must alter the kinds of emotions expressed to fit
specific situational contexts have to engage in more active planning and
conscious monitoring of their behavior. Consequently, the amount of psy-
chological energy they have to expend in emotional labor will be greater
as well.
Emotional displays in organizations have been characterized as posi-
tive, neutral, or negative in nature (Wharton & Erickson, 1993). Positive
emotional displays are aimed at increasing bonds of liking between em-
ployees and customers; display rules emphasizing emotional neutrality
are used to convey dispassionate authority and status; negative display
rules emphasizing anger and hostility often are employed to intimidate
or subdue clients (e.g., bouncers).
Given the dynamic nature of many service encounters, it is not surpris-
ing to find that different sets of occupational and organizational display
rules are sometimes utilized as the demands of a given transaction change
(Sutton, 1991). For example, salespeople may be encouraged to give indi-
vidualized attention to customers when business is slow, and they may
be encouraged to speed up transactions as the number of customers wait-
ing in line increases or as it nears closing time (Leidner, 1989; Rafaeli,
1989a). Similarly, some jobs (such as those of professors) often require
frequent changes of emotions that are displayed: positive emotions to
build enthusiasm, negative emotions to support discipline, and neutrality
of emotions to demonstrate fairness and professionalism. Thus, the
amount of emotional labor involved in regulating emotional expression
may be significantly influenced by variety.
The extent to which the variety of expressed emotions changes over
time also may have an impact on the planning and adjustment needed
to display organizationally desired emotions. For example, a debt collector
who works on bills that are 30 days overdue on Monday, 90 days overdue
on Tuesday, and 6 months overdue on Wednesday exhibits a fairly wide
variety of emotional displays, because interactions with different kinds
of delinquent accounts requires different amounts of cajoling, sympathy,
and anger (Sutton, 1991). Additionally, the same debt collector who works
on all three types of overdue accounts within a single day will need to
992 Academy of Management Beview October
FIGURE 1
Relationships Among Four Dimensions of Emotional Labor
Frequency Variety of
of Emotional Emotions
Display Expressed
Attentiveness
Emotional
to Required
Dissonance
Display Rules
the park, were much more likely to report instances in which they experi-
enced significant conflicts between what was expected of them and what
they actually felt.
Attentiveness to required display rules should be positively associ-
ated with variety of expressed emotions. As the duration and intensity of
interactions increase, employees often are called upon to display a wider
and wider set of emotions. For instance, Sutton (1991) found that debt
collectors who interacted with debtors on an almost continuous basis were
likely to display many different types of emotions because their demeanor
varied dramatically from client to client. When debtors sounded indiffer-
ent, debt collectors were expected to express anger; when debtors sounded
angry or upset, debt collectors were expected to express emotional neu-
trality.
Attentiveness to display rules also should be positively associated
with increased emotional dissonance. The longer and more intense the
emotional display, the greater the probability that an employee's "real"
feelings will conflict with expected emotions. As noted previously, interac-
tions of longer duration are more likely to become unscripted and to reveal
personal information about the customer; this knowledge makes it harder
for employees to control their own personal feelings. It is for this reason,
lames (1989) noted, that physicians often keep interactions with patients
short. Shorter, less intense visits make it less likely physicians will become
emotionally involved with patients, thereby violating occupational norms
of emotional neutrality.
Finally, variety of expressed emotions and emotional dissonance
should be negatively related. This should be true because a highly re-
stricted range of emotions at work simply increases the chances that
expected emotion will conflict with genuinely felt emotion. The typical
range of emotions outside the workplace runs the gamut from very positive
to very negative; a restricted range of emotions to be displayed at work
increases the probability employees will have to express emotions that
they do not really feel (Wharton & Erickson, 1993).
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1996 Morris and Feldman 997
omy over their expressive behavior may be more likely to violate organiza-
tional display rules when those rules conflict with their own genuinely
felt emotions. Hence, employees who have more job autonomy should
experience less emotional dissonance.
Proposition 10: Job autonomy will be negatively associ-
ated with emotional dissonance.
Affectivity. Affectivity has been defined as a general tendency to expe-
rience a particular mood (e.g., to be happy or sad) or to react to objects
(e.g., jobs, people) in a particular way or with certain emotions (Lazarus,
1993). Positive affectivity reflects the extent to which a person feels enthusi-
astic, active, and alert. Negative affectivity subsumes a variety of aversive
mood states, including anger, contempt, disgust, and fear (Watson & Tel-
legen, 1985). Although some previous research indicates that positive and
negative affect are two separate constructs (Watson & Clark, 1984), ludge
(1992) suggested that positive and negative affect represent opposite ends
of one construct that concerns the amount of happiness an individual
experiences over time.
A number of researchers have tested the behavioral consequences of
affective states (see Isen & Baron, 1991; Judge, 1992, for reviews). Affect
has been related empirically to helping behavior (George & Brief, 1992),
evaluations of others (Cardy & Dobbins, 1986), biases in information pro-
cessing (Alloy & Abramson, 1988), and performance on decisional and
interpersonal tasks (Staw & Barsade, 1993).
We argue in this article that positive and negative affectivity also
may have significant influences on emotional dissonance. Simply put,
individuals may be better suited for their positions when there is conver-
gence between the expected emotional expression on their jobs and their
own predisposition to experience the same type of emotions. Thus, individ-
uals who experience positive emotions more often than negative (positive
affectivity) should find that emotional labor that requires the display of
positive emotion requires less active monitoring of emotional experience,
because there will be less frequent dissonance between their genuinely
felt emotions and emotions to be displayed.
Proposition 11: Positive affectivity will be positively cor-
related with emotional dissonance when the display
rules require the expression of negative emotion.
Proposition 12: Negative affectivity will be positively cor-
related with emotional dissonance when the display
rules require the expression of positive emotion.
confhct between the needs and values of a person and the demands of
others in his or her role set. Previous research suggests that a key anteced-
ent of emotional exhaustion is such role conflict (Jackson et al., 1986;
Lee & Ashforth, 1993). In the case of debt collectors, for example, emotional
dissonance can be said to exist when debt collectors feel sympathy and
compassion for distressed debtors, yet they are expected by the debt collec-
tion agency to express negative emotion to these same debtors.
Proposifion 16: Emotional dissonance will be positively
associated with emotional exhaustion.
Dimensions Associated with Job Satisfaction
Previous theoretical work on emotional labor suggests a negative
relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction. However, re-
searchers who conducted two empirical tests of this relationship (Adel-
mann, 1989; Wharton, 1993) did not find a negative relationship. In fact,
Wharton (1993) found that high emotional labor was positively related to
job satisfaction.
Person-environment fit theory (Caplan, 1983) and the dispositional
approach to attitudes (Arvey, Bouchard, Segal, & Abraham, 1989; Staw,
Bell, & Clausen, 1986) both suggest the possibility that some employees
may not find expression of organizationally desired emotion particularly
unpleasant. In some cases, employees can go on "automatic pilot" and
experience only "emotional numbness" during emotional labor (Leidner,
1989). Further, emotional labor that reduces uncertainty or helps to avoid
embarrassing interpersonal situations actually may be associated with
increased job satisfaction (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Goffman, 1959).
Thus, it may not be frequency of emotional expression, the attentive-
ness to required display rules, or the variety of required emotional displays
that influences job dissatisfaction. Instead, we contend that the key dimen-
sion of emotional labor that is negatively associated with job satisfaction
is emotional dissonance. Rutter and Fielding (1988), for instance, found
that a perceived need to suppress genuinely felt emotion in the workplace
is negatively associated with job satisfaction. Similarly, Lawler (1973)
suggested that it is the discrepancy between the employee's perceptions
of conditions that should exist and those that actually do exist that deter-
mines job satisfaction.
Proposifion 17: Emotional dissonance will be negatively
associated with job satisfaction.
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1010 Academy ot Management Beview October