The Affective Consequences of Service Work

Abstract

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.