Dictionary

emotional labor en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (US) audio

Etymology

Coined by American professor and author Arlie Russell Hochschild in 1983 in her book The Managed Heart.

Meanings

1. (uncountable) The act of managing feelings and displaying certain expressions in order to meet the requirements of a job.
   • Further, theory on emotional labor—or organizationally mandated “rules” requiring employees to engage in “surface acting, deep acting, and the expression of spontaneous and genuine emotion” […] suggests that such emotional expectations create pressure to identify with one's work role. 2016, Michael G. Pratt, Majken Schultz, Blake E. Ashforth, Davide Ravasi, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity, Oxford University Press, →ISBN:
   • It was that “pinch,” or conflict, between such feelings and the pilot’s Call for authenticity that led me to write down in my own notebook, "emotional labor." 1983, Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, University of California Press:
   • Emotional labor does not observe conventional distinctions between types of jobs. By my estimate, roughly one-third of American workers today have jobs that subject them to substantial demands for emotional labor. 2007, Helena Wulff, editor, The Emotions: A Cultural Reader, Berg Publishers, →ISBN, page 88:
   • Another way to put it is that these jobs require emotional labour, not manual labour. And women, even unskilled women, are much better at emotional labour than men are. 2009 May 20, Margaret Wente, “We are witnessing the passing of working-class masculinity”, in The Globe and Mail, archived from the original on 27 May 2009:
2. (uncountable) Jobs which require such management and display.
   • In emotional labor jobs (Hochschild 1983), emotional displays are a matter of survival rather than personal choice, as job security and pay are dependent on them. 2015, Alicia Grandey, Deborah Rupp, William Bice, “Emotional labor threatens decent work: A proposal to eradicate emotional display rules”, in Journal of Organizational Behavior, →DOI, page 770:
3. (uncountable) The display and management of emotion in non-professional, interpersonal relationships; emotion work.
   • Like domestic labor, emotional labor is generally dismissed and not labeled work, but research shows it can be just as exhausting as paid work. Emotional labor can lead to insomnia and family conflict, according to a study published in Personnel Psychology. 2018 November 14, Kristin Wong, “There’s a Stress Gap Between Men and Women. Here’s Why It’s Important.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 21 Jan 2021:
   • One of the biggest shifts is that much of the conversation about emotional labor has left its original sphere of the workplace and moved to the home. 2018 November 26, Julie Beck, “The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor’”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 23 Apr 2019:
   • The divide in who does what when it comes to housework persists because of our gendered expectation for women to perform emotional labor. We are the ones who decide whether to do a task ourselves or to delegate it to someone else, and doing physical labor is often the easier road. 2018, Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Navigating and Redefining Emotional Labor for Good:

Forms

Relateds

emotional work · interactional shitwork · have a nice day syndrome