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15 Emotional Labor in the Human Service Organization

Mary E. Guy
Meredith A. Newman
Sharon H. Mastracci
Steven Maynard-Moody
Emotional Labor and Service Delivery

Even as human service organizations become more complex and technologically advanced, person-to-person interaction remains at the core of their work. Intake workers may spend hours entering data into the latest client management software, and increasingly this information is available from other computer databases. But their jobs require contact with and questioning of clients, who may be hostile and uncooperative and whose needs rarely conform to the routinized questions of computerized forms. Welfare-to-work counselors present standardized job skill classes but are often interrupted by the demands and needs of their students. They also scan job listings for one-size-fits-all work opportunities, but then they must see how the needs, skills, and aspirations of their clients correspond to these job openings (Dias & Maynard-Moody, 2007). The 911 operators are isolated in their high-tech call centers but encounter people in crisis over the phone line. Public defenders must deal with cold evidence, the law, and legal proceedings yet in the process interact with individuals and families in crisis. Even the routine traffic stop—beginning with a computer “tag” check and ending with a standard ticket—involves interacting with disgruntled and sometimes abusive citizens.

Emotional labor is the instrument through which worker-client or state agent-citizen interactions occur. It is relational work that elicits behaviors and feelings from clients and citizens, but it also requires human service workers to manage their own emotions. It requires emotional engagement and emotional management. Although emotions and feelings are often dismissed as unprofessional and interfering, they are required, if human services are to be delivered effectively.

In this chapter, we present the substance of emotional labor through the words of human service practitioners who exercise these skills daily. Based on interviews and focus groups, we present, in their own words, how social workers, 911 operators, corrections officials, and guardians ad litem experience their work. To protect their anonymity, we note without citation where we have drawn quoted material from our interviews. Passages from these interviews complement the empirical data acquired from surveys administered in three prototypical settings for emotional labor: the Cook County Office of Public Guardian (OPG), the Illinois Department of Corrections, and the Tallahassee Police Department Dispatch Unit (see Guy, Newman, & Mastracci, 2008, Appendix B for a detailed description of the research design). We close with a discussion of how this subject informs the practice of human service delivery and how it can affect approaches to training and skills for service workers. (It is important to note that while this chapter focuses on the emotional skills and responses of workers, clients also apply their own emotional skills and resources to alter the situation and their interaction with human service organizations.)

Emotional Labor as a Necessary Skill

Emotional labor or emotion work is the engagement, suppression, or evocation of the worker's emotions necessary to get the job done; it can be purposeful or unplanned, and influences the actions and responses of others. In general, the performance of emotion work requires a wide range of personal and interpersonal skills, which, like most skills, are based on talent and individual characteristics but can be honed and refined through practice and training. Emotional labor occurs in the context of a wide variety of organizations, and the nature of these organizations can shape the expression and experience of emotional labor.

Another way to think about emotional labor is to view it as a specialized form of knowledge work for jobs that require person-to-person transactions. Emotional labor requires face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions, emotive sensing, perceptive-ness, active listening, negotiating, empathizing, developing rapport, and monitoring one's own affect as well as that of others. Emotional labor requires affective sensitivity and flexibility with one's emotions as well as with those of others. As one social worker from the OPG observes,

I try to think what emotional string I can pull to get the person to relax, to calm down, to talk to me. It doesn't work to meet anger with anger. You have to stay professional, you have to stay calm, and to some degree you have to understand. We're dealing with people.

A coworker suggests another dimension of emotional labor:

I think that people who are really effective generally have—what's the word I want to use?—a pretty strong character—the sense that they care about what goes on but they don't fall apart. For example, we had this horrible report on a child who tortured two cats and killed them… kittens actually… You know, as awful as it is, you have to have a strong enough constitution that you can deal with whatever there is and at the same time not be so blunted that it doesn't matter anymore.

To summarize, essential emotional labor skills include the ability to

1. sense the affect of the other through intuition and communication and, importantly, alter one's own affect as appropriate;
2. elicit the desired emotional response from others; and
3. evoke and display emotions, at times, that one does not actually feel—to act—so as to shape the interpersonal and social situation.
In human service work, emotional labor is part of the job. It is not an incidental or unavoidable by-product. Unfortunately, the skill and ability to perform it are rarely included as formal job requirements. Client-centered training is a fundamental part of the professional preparation of teachers, social workers, and therapists, but the effort that it takes to privilege the needs of the client is often overlooked. Over time, this takes a toll on human service workers. There is often little specific training and support for emotional labor.

Emotional Labor as Performance

Emotional labor is a proactive and reactive performance. It is deliberate and artful, and it is reactive and, to a degree, outside the conscious control of the worker. It is relational work that is tempered by the affective skills of the worker, the affective state of the client, and the purpose and nature of the exchange between worker and client. It requires the artful sensing of the other's emotional state and crafting of one's own affective expression so as to elicit the desired response on the part of the other.

For the skilled professional worker, emotional labor becomes a performance art designed to elicit a predetermined desirable outcome. This outcome may be directly related to client outcomes, such as better parenting or job skills, or may involve workers' management of their own emotional responses. In the words of one frontline social worker,

If you screw up, it's not just a piece of paper that's screwed up; it could really be crucial in terms of the welfare of the child, so I think that's the major stress…. Ultimately, you have to put it into little, you know, pockets, because otherwise if you don't, things get overly stressed and you don't become effective. We actually talk about that a lot, and it doesn't do to get over the top with it because then you stop being effective.

Prior References

There are a number of terms in the literature that capture different dimensions of emotional labor. Emotional labor and emotion work are distinguished from physical labor and knowledge work, although many (perhaps most) jobs, such as firefighting or case work, are a mix of emotional, physical, and knowledge work (Diefendorff & Richard, 2003; Glomb, Kammeyer-Mueller, & Rotundo, 2004; Hochschild, 1979, 1983). Another term found in the literature is emotion management (Domagalski, 1999; Morris & Feldman, 1997). In general, emotion management focuses on the deliberate effort by workers to elicit behaviors and feelings from their clients and to shield themselves from workplace stressors—what we have termed artful affect.

Various dimensions of emotional labor have traditionally been associated with gender roles. Emotional labor often requires compassion, empathy, and warmth. This caring dimension is referred to as caritas in the literature (Guy & Newman, 2004) and is generally gendered as feminine. But emotional labor also involves overcoming—even overlooking—emotionally charged situations so as to act effectively. Suppressing one's emotional response is a form of toughness and is considered more masculine, even macho. Emotional toughness is often associated with jobs, such as law enforcement and corrections, in which a tough demeanor is employed to produce compliance and subordination. For example, police officers often follow standard scripts when interacting with citizens. They present themselves as cold, professional, and unflappable (Pogrebin & Poole, 1991). A macho demeanor is also required in many social work jobs, such as those involving child protective and substance abuse services. George Thompson (1983, 2006) describes such cool, deliberate interactions as verbal judo. Borrowing from the martial arts, verbal judo emphasizes anticipating the actions of others and engaging others in quick, verbal moves to quell a risky situation.

Effective workers in jobs that require emotional labor often need both types of skills and the ability to know quickly—that is, to intuit—which approach will be effective. The more macho verbal judo is not suitable in situations and occupations that require workers to build trust relationships with clients, but caritas does not suffice in organizational contexts that require control over clients and one's own emotional response to difficult situations. For example, policing is not commonly thought of as a form of emotional labor. Nonetheless, police training emphasizes maintaining control over emotions and never letting obnoxious, irate, or even threatening citizens arouse a strong emotional response. Emotionally labile police officers are considered a liability and unprofessional. This cool control over the emotions required by police work does not, however, eliminate the need for police to exercise the communication and human relations skills more commonly associated with the caritas dimensions of emotional labor (Martin, 1999).

Consequences of Emotional Labor: Burnout and Compassion Fatigue

The emotional demands of human service work are most often discussed not in terms of the work itself but in terms of the toll it takes on workers. In social services, the terms compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization underscore how draining and brutalizing human service work can be (Adams, Boscarino, & Figley, 2006; Figley, 1995, 2002; Pearlman & MacIan, 1995; Sprang, Clark, & Whitt-Woosley, 2007; Stamm, 2005). Compassion fatigue occurs when the worker is overcome by the cumulative effects of prolonged exposure to empathetic suffering. In this circumstance, the emotional demands of exercising caritas overwhelm the worker, who may then become emotionally detached.

Vicarious traumatization occurs when workers internalize or “take on” the trauma experienced by their clients. Emotional empathy, an essential quality of emotional labor, breaks through the professional worker-client relationship. Maddy Cunningham (2003) observed this vicarious traumatization among social workers who worked with sexual abuse victims and who counseled cancer patients, two emotionally demanding jobs. She found that trauma-induced stress “maybe especially severe or long-lasting when the stressor is of human design” (p. 424). These observations are consistent with stress as differentiated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Often a worker's personal history and years of experience affected, among other factors, the levels of trauma he or she experienced. As in other elements of emotional labor, vicarious traumatization is based on the interplay of the worker's own experience with that of the client.

The hard work of emotional labor builds ever thicker emotional calluses, which may reduce the pain but blunt empathy. Compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatization can lead to indifference and burnout. In the words of one social worker,

I think the greatest danger in these kinds of jobs… [for] case workers… is that they get so used to the abnormal that it begins to look normal, and that's when you start having problems. If you begin to think that every house should have green plastic bags with dirty laundry and garbage all over the place, and you begin to think that's the norm, you're in deep trouble. And then you need to leave, because I think you have to be able to still be appalled and annoyed and shocked and angry and all those things without, as I said, going over the bend with it.

Emotional Labor, Job Satisfaction, and Burnout

Emotional labor directly implicates the self—it is personal—and is accompanied by distinct psychological benefits and costs (Wharton, 1999). Performing emotional labor is at the crux of the therapeutic relationship between worker and client. Emotional labor can be emotionally draining and traumatizing, but it can also have positive outcomes. The burnout often associated with emotional labor involves emotional exhaustion, stress, cynicism, and ineffectiveness. The positive side of emotional labor involves engagement that engenders energy, involvement, and a sense of efficacy (Leiter & Maslach, 2000; Zapf, Seifert, Schmutte, Mertini, & Holz, 2001).

Figure 15.1 presents a model that shows the interrelationships between emotional labor, job satisfaction, and burnout. This model describes the individual worker's choice to respond to emotional aspects of the work. The keying event, however, is the job task, which is defined largely by the organizational context of work. It simplifies jobs into two categories—those that demand emotional labor and those that do not—even though most jobs require some degree of emotional labor. As workers encounter a task, they determine whether it requires emotional work. If not, then the technical aspects of the job are completed, and the employee moves on to another task. If the task requires emotional labor, then there remains a choice of whether or not to perform it and, if so, how to engage. This is a critical observation: The demand to engage in emotion work is not necessarily followed by engagement in emotion work. Every worker “falls down on the job” from time to time. Repeated failure to meet the emotional labor requirements of one's job, however, is the same as repeated failure to meet other well-defined elements of the job description. The human service worker who cannot or will not meet the emotional labor requirements of his or her job is not doing the job. If the worker fails to meet the emotional demand or if the demands require the worker to falsely express an emotional response, he or she may experience emotional exhaustion, which decreases job satisfaction and increases burnout. Either outcome—satisfaction or burnout—is followed by the demands of yet another task, and the cycle starts anew.

Depending on the worker's effectiveness, this circular process can heighten the worker's sense of accomplishment or exacerbate his or her dissatisfaction (Heuven, Bakker, Schaufeli, & Huisman, 2006). Therefore, Figure 15.1 illustrates the cumulative and cyclical nature of emotional labor. Prior success bolsters feelings of efficacy and improves future performance, while bad experiences erode worker confidence and increase burnout. Negative results are more likely when workers must repeatedly display emotions incompatible with their actual feelings.

The performance of emotion work is related to the organizational context. Counselors and therapists must establish trust to create a therapeutic relationship. Crisis line call takers must engender a sense of calm to obtain the needed information. Prison guards must maintain an air of authority. The horrified social worker, icy counselor, panicked 911 operator, or intimidated prison guard will fail to complete his or her job.

Organizational culture, norms, and expectations will shape the extent to which emotion work is performed and how workers talk about it. Jeffrey Karabanow (1999) described how the culture of one youth shelter fostered the performance of emotion work to a far greater extent than others. Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003) demonstrated how police officers, teachers, and vocational counselors preserved meaning and value by using their own judgment and stretching the rules while performing emotional labor. The effect of organizational culture is confirmed by a study that investigated emotional labor in three distinct workplaces (Guy et al., 2008).

Figure 15.1 Relationship Between Emotional Labor (EL), Job Satisfaction, and Burnout


How Do These Issues Interrelate?

Figure 15.1 illustrates the interrelationships among emotional labor, job satisfaction, and burnout. Guy et al. (2008) tested these relationships empirically in their study of emotional labor in human service jobs. They conducted a survey and completed interviews with a wide range of human service workers, including 911 operators, social workers, police detectives, guardians ad litem, and frontline corrections workers. Across these different types of workers, they examined (a) the degree to which human service workers reported that they perform emotion work, (b) their level of perceived ability and effectiveness in performing emotional labor, and (c) the differences across agencies. Guy et al.'s findings are detailed in their book Emotional Labor: Putting the Service in Public Service and are summarized here.

Emotional labor is not agency specific. Guy et al. (2008) chose three different types of agencies and forms of human service work seeking to identify differences and commonalities in emotional labor across the spectrum of human service organizations. One important, if surprising, finding was that the extent and importance of emotional labor did not differ across these contrasting organizations: Emotional labor was central to the work of 911 operators who deal with the public, public guardians who work with abandoned or abused children and the elderly, and guards in corrections facilities. All three types of work required emotional labor, and there were greater differences among individuals in each setting than between the three settings. This indicated that the skill required to perform emotion work, just like cognitive labor, resides primarily in the individual and not the work environment. Moreover, individuals in any setting vary in the emotional labor that they exert.

This is not to say that the cultures of each of these three organizations supported workers' emotional labor efforts equally. Steven Lopez's (2006) research reveals that organizational cultures and different managerial philosophies shape emotional labor demands. He found that some offices recognize the importance of social support, and their organizational cultures reflect such emphasis. There is a strong body of evidence that a lack of social support is linked to numerous, stress-related outcomes, including burnout (Golembiewski, Munzenrider, & Stevenson, 1986). Social support from family, friends, church groups, or coworkers can become a buffer against burnout. Venting feelings with coworkers was a recurring theme in the interviews and an important source of social support. The Guy et al.'s (2008) three sites lie along a spectrum from lesser to greater recognition of emotion work demands. Similarly, the three nursing homes examined by Lopez (2006, p. 133) were “distinguished by the presence or absence of emotional feeling rules and affective requirements.” Corrections workers protect themselves by concealing their inner selves and embodying a deliberately macho persona to cope “inside the fences.” Moreover, multiple individual coping strategies may become institutionalized into organizational norms.

The 911 call takers accept responsibility for the safety of their colleagues in emergency response units. Their talent for instilling calm and eliciting complete information amid chaos may determine whether emergency responders face mortal danger. Their emotion work is further determined by its medium: Dispatchers can do nothing but listen as a situation descends into chaos. One call taker describes the burden on the call taker for the safety of emergency responders, the welfare of callers in crisis, and (finally) the preservation of self:

I think the breaking point came the night the officer got shot, and we had to come in and still work and do radio dispatch… But… the only thing I wanted to do was say, you know, your call about a noisy party is not that important right now, we've got someone dying, you know, can you be a little bit sympathetic and a little bit understanding…. They were just rude, and I think that was my breaking point…. There's so many rude people that just don't care about anybody else. They're so self-centered, and I became less compassionate from that point on, especially towards calls like that.

Moreover, the nature of call takers' work precludes their learning the outcome of the emergency; their attention quickly shifts to the next call, the next crisis. The press of calls rarely allows closure because they seldom learn the outcome. The organizational ethos of the 911 dispatch center with respect to emotional support is demonstrated in their job descriptions, which acknowledge affective requirements (City of Tallahassee, 2003): “The abilities to listen, comprehend, retain, prioritize, make fast and accurate decisions, react quickly and calmly in emergencies, perform multiple duties simultaneously, and effectively communicate orally and in writing with coworkers, supervisors, and the public” (p. 377).

Corrections officers, however, are largely left to their own devices to negotiate the emotional work demand. The organizational structure of a correctional facility is based on a military-style chain of command and a bureaucratic division of labor (Quinn, 2003) in which evaluations are based on a hierarchical system that rewards recordkeeping and regulated performance. A female guard at a state prison for men describes her work environment:

Another factor for job dissatisfaction, for me, has been working for “male chauvinist” bosses… Are we happy about being talked down to and treated inferior? It is the “all males club” and discrimination is alive and well.

Not only is the role of emotional labor ignored in a correctional facility, but expressions of emotion are overtly penalized. An administrator describes the pressure that he feels to hide his emotions. His own professional reputation is on the line as is the credibility of his office:

So as far as emotional stress and those things, I can't let that get me down cuz as a leader of the clinical department, if they see me getting down or frustrated their first reaction is gonna be, “oh man, the department ain't crap,” you know?

In contrast, the mission of the Cook County, Illinois, OPG is “To supply our clients with competency, diligence, integrity, professionalism, and understanding during our relentless quest to help improve the quality and dignity of their lives; To supply our judiciary and adversaries with genuine respect, dignity, credibility, and civility.” The emotional labor demands of public guardian employees are organizationally understood, and workers possess the autonomy to determine how they do their jobs. Mission trumps structure at OPG: Senior attorneys mentor and advise attorneys with less experience, and incident review teams have point persons, but evidence of institutional hierarchy is almost nonexistent. Organizational form follows agency function. Client interview forms advise both caseworkers and investigators that “clients should be interviewed alone and individually… Vocabulary and manner must be adapted to the age and comprehension level of each client, while avoiding leading questions” (OPG Client Interview Form [revised 2/02]). The importance of emotion work is embedded in the organization's mission statement and filters through its most essential managerial practices:

The office has not really done evaluations. We don't fill out timesheets, we don't fill out worksheets… one of the things you don't do is you don't hire people in this office who are rigidly committed to schedules or who say, you know, this is how my day is scheduled and I have to do A, B, C, D. It doesn't work here… we put that… right up front. If you can't handle that, don't come because the best made plans around here go up in smoke on a weekly basis.

Emotional labor contributes to job satisfaction but does not always lead to burnout. Guy et al. (2008) also found that the successful performance of emotional labor contributed to pride and meaning in work; it was an essential dimension of job satisfaction in human service work. Performing emotional labor does not always reduce motivation and engender burnout; it can be one of the most motivating and rewarding aspects of human service work. Although most research focuses on the negative aspects of emotional work, such as burnout (see, e.g., Zapf, Vogt, Seifert, Mertini, & Isic, 1999), emotional labor is often highly motivating. As one supervisor at OPG explained,

I have actually only been here for four and a half years and I absolutely love it…. I think that, as far as doing something where you really feel like you make an impact, this is it. One of my staff told me today that they were offered a school social worker job, but they really feel like what they do here is more meaningful and important…. Nobody's getting rich here, and it's not like, you know, you get any kind of that kind of reward from it. So, I mean, people hang in here because they think it's important and they feel like what they do matters.

False face demands lead to burnout. Human service workers experience the greatest stress and burnout when they have to suppress their own emotions while expressing another emotion. In this circumstance, they feel that they must act “as if” they feel a certain way—sympathetic, rather than repulsed, for example—when they do not. This false face is the one dimension of emotional labor that discourages worker motivation and increases burnout. To further examine this issue, survey items were scaled into three dimensions of emotional labor (emotional labor per se, personal efficacy, and false face) and three dimensions of worker response (job satisfaction, pride in job, and burnout). The items that constitute these scales and Cronbach's alpha associated with each scale are summarized in Table 15.1.

The relationships among these factors are examined in Table 15.2. In this analysis, the three worker response scales are modeled as dependent variables and the three dimensions of emotional labor as independent variables. As shown in Table 15.2, performance of emotional labor per se positively and significantly affects pride in work. There is an inverse relationship between false face and pride in work, suggesting that workers who must pretend to feel a certain way to complete their work take less pride in their efforts. The results are similar for job satisfaction. Workers have greater job satisfaction when they perform emotional labor and when they feel that their emotion work has results.

Simply performing emotional labor does lead to burnout, but, importantly, this relationship is similar in strength to the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction. The differences appear when we examine the relationship between personal efficacy and burnout: Workers who feel less capable of performing emotion work experience greater burnout. It is less the emotional demands of human service work that lead to burnout than the inability of workers—whether for personal, job-related, or organizational reasons—to cope with these demands that lead to burnout. When workers are not able to respond to the emotional demands of their work they report that working with people becomes stressful and unfulfilling; their job is hardening them emotionally, forcing them to become more detached; they leave work feeling exhausted, both physically and emotionally; and they feel depleted, used up.

The relationship between emotional labor and burnout and its various expressions—compassion fatigue, compassion stress, vicarious traumatization, and secondary traumatic stress—is complicated and often counterintuitive (Figley, 1995, 2002; Pearlman & MacIan, 1995; Sprang et al., 2007; Stamm, 2005). It has long been thought that work that requires direct contact with people, especially those in need or in difficult circumstances, is more conducive to burnout. Research suggests that the opposite may be true. Human service jobs do not inexorably lead to higher rates of burnout than nonhuman service work, such as physical labor and clerical work (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002). Human service workers often report high rates of personal accomplishment and lower levels of depersonalization, both of which may reduce the burnout experience. The one factor that consistently leads to greater stress and burnout is the need to fake emotional expressions and to pretend to feel one emotion while actually feeling another, the false face. Surface acting and faking emotional expressions at work are related to feeling exhausted and detached, whereas genuine emotional work is related to a strong sense of personal accomplishment.

Table 15.1 Constructs That Emerge From the Data



Note: NA, not applicable.

Table 15.2 Summary of Regression Analyses for Three Models


Source: Guy et al. (2008).

*p < .01, **p < .001.

Nonetheless, emotion work leaves little margin for error. The line between honest and false emotional expression is often indistinct and hard to maintain. Moreover, high-stakes jobs can take their toll, no matter how rewarding. A 911 call taker recounted the experience of a coworker:

She called one day and said she wasn't coming to work because she couldn't take the stress any more—making sure she always did the right thing with the person that called. She said she would go home at the end of the day, and it would just be overwhelming to her [to] do the right thing for this person: did I forget to do this, did I forget to do that…. We've had people—sitting in there dispatching in the radio—just push back and say, “I can't do this,” get up, and walk out and don't come back.

Outlook mediates the effect of emotional labor. To examine how workers value their performance, Guy et al. (2008) generated two additional index variables that capture whether workers view their work as a waste of time or as worthwhile. As shown in Table 15.1, a positive assessment of work is measured with a single survey item: I am making a difference in my job. Waste of Time is a scale based on four items. The analyses of these relationships are presented in Table 15.3. Workers who feel that they are making a difference are more likely to experience job satisfaction (r = 0.68) and less likely to report burnout (r = −0.09). Conversely, feeling that you are wasting your time at work is strongly associated with burnout (r = 0.47) and inversely related to job satisfaction (r = −0.78); indeed, these conditions may be symptoms of burnout.

These findings underscore the importance of recognizing the emotional labor demands faced by workers. Both satisfaction and burnout accompany emotional labor. Feeling that one is making a difference increases the confidence to engage in emotional labor and, at the same time, exposes the worker to the personal demands of emotional labor. When workers feel that they are making a difference, their job satisfaction increases, but when they feel that they are not making a difference—that they are wasting their time—their job satisfaction declines. When workers feel that they can no longer affect their clients, they disengage from emotional labor: Workers who think that their jobs are a waste of time tend not to engage in emotional labor.

Workers take satisfaction from emotion work as long as their personal feelings are consistent with the emotions they express in the performance of their work. Workers who do not feel competent in their ability to perform emotion work and must falsely present their own feelings are prone to burnout in all its various expressions. Organizational cultures that expressly discount emotion at work and emphasize depersonalized “professionalism”—as articulated by corrections workers and in one of Lopez's (2006) subject sites—are not given the tools to hone this skill and are told in so many words that they do not need them. Workers who feel competent to handle such situations take pride and satisfaction in their skill, as this 911 call taker recalls,

Table 15.3 Correlations Among Index Variables

Burnout

Job Satisfaction

Work Is Worthwhile

Work Is a Waste of Time

Burnout

1

Job satisfaction

−0.2867

1

Work is worthwhile

−0.0889

0.6812

1

Work is a waste of time

0.4748

−0.7827

0.5797

1

Source: Guy et al. (2008).

My first suicide was… I had a gentleman who called up and said “I just wanted someone to hear.”… He shot himself in the mouth, and the whole time while the officers [were on the way], this is all I hear [makes sounds]. You know, while he's dying. And so I don't think you can even be prepared for that. And I was also on the radio when an officer was shot and killed. I was the last person he talked to, but I did everything I could.

Human service professionals often report that, in spite of the tremendous emotional stress involved in client contact, this is not what causes their burnout; contact is also the most rewarding part of their job. Bureaucratic hassles, senseless rules, and meaningless paperwork, which reduce a worker's ability to appropriately and genuinely respond to the needs of clients and citizens, are more likely the cause of burnout than emotional labor per se (Pines & Aronson, 1988). As one correctional supervisor reports,

It's all about paper now…. I get a stack of paper that I need to sign and that really just bugs me to death…. I have paper everywhere and I'm signing my name…. Each document I have to sign three different names cause I'm the designee and that's very overwhelming and when you have phone calls coming in—oh my God, how am I gonna do this? The paperwork is killing us.

Throughout the interviews, workers would first recount a particularly horrific case and then dismiss the experience as “just part of the job.” The exceptional is the routine. They would launch into a diatribe about the amount of paperwork or hassles with their supervisors or peers but describe their personal satisfaction and meaning in their engagement with clients. To them, acceptable emotional labor involved work with clients. Unacceptable emotional labor involved work demands that were not associated with clients.

Summary of Emotional Labor in the Human Service Organization

Emotional labor has many dimensions. We know that some people are more skilled in performing emotional labor than others and that emotional labor can lead to deep satisfaction with work but can also contribute to burnout. Our research makes six observations about emotional labor. These observations underscore our current understanding of emotional labor and provide directions for future research.

1. Caritas is undervalued. Most frontline workers in human service organizations are women. (There are, of course, exceptions to this as most frontline workers in criminal justice and corrections are men.) Tasks that require emotion work, such as caring, negotiating, empathizing, smoothing troubled relationships, and engendering cooperation, are traditionally considered women's work. Jobs that require emotional control and restraint—being tough—are traditionally considered more masculine. These differences may be more job than gender determined, however. Guy et al. (2008) found that men and women performing the same job did not report meaningful differences in their performance of emotion work. Certain jobs require more caritas while others more macho; the jobs themselves are “gendered” even if men and women perform both with similar skill. Although essential in human services, the caring dimension of emotional labor is often absent from job descriptions, which makes caritas invisible and uncompensated. Occupations that require high levels of caritas pay lower wages for both women and men, although even in these jobs men earn more, on average, than women (Guy & Newman, 2004). More macho service jobs—policing, fire service, and corrections, for example—generally pay nearly 25% more than service jobs, such as social work and counseling (Guy & Killingsworth, 2007). Work that requires rapport, supportiveness, congeniality, nurturance, and empathy have long been denigrated as “home” rather than “work” behavior and, therefore, devalued in the labor market. Mary Ellen Guy and Meredith Newman (2004) examined salaries for selected state workers in Florida. They learned that Florida family service counselors, who are responsible for maintaining huge caseloads of foster care children and are required to perform an extraordinary amount of relational work, earn only slightly more than Florida fruit and vegetable inspectors, who check shipments of melons for infestation. Clearly the nature of the work and level of responsibility did not determine salaries. Joyce Fletcher (1999) recounts her work in an engineering firm. She describes the essential and time-consuming emotional labor required to keep the teams working effectively together. She had to smooth over disagreements and anticipate the emotions of others to avoid or divert “show stopping” disagreements. Her contributions to successful projects were not included in her performance appraisals and were never acknowledged or compensated.
2. Emotional labor involves pretending to feel emotions and hiding inappropriate or unnecessary emotions. Emotional labor requires workers to manage their own emotions while at the same time attempting to manage or direct the emotions of others. This requires workers to match the emotion of the client or, at times, to suppress their own feelings and display another emotion so as to elicit the desired response from the client. Playing a role, expressing false emotions, and hiding genuine emotions are hard, stressful, and put workers at high risk for burnout.
3. Emotional labor involves dealing with difficult and unfriendly people. One of the most common complaints of those who do emotion work is that they must be courteous, even friendly, to people who are angry, accusatory, demanding, or hostile. In The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Arlie Hochschild (1983) describes the stresses of the service industry when flight attendants and sales clerks must remain charming and helpful no matter how rude and abusive members of the public become. Many human service workers take pride in their ability to remain in emotional control or to calm others who are angry or upset. Police officers, for example, consider remaining cool and in control central to being professional. Workers with high levels of skill in controlling the emotional context of their work take pride and satisfaction in this accomplishment.
4. Workers exerting emotional labor feel that they are good at helping coworkers. Human service workers who report that they are skilled and accomplished in dealing with the emotional demands of their clients also report that they are helpful to coworkers. Working in human service organizations takes a toll on everyone; these are often impossible jobs (Hargrove & Glidewell, 1990). Helping coworkers deal with the emotional demands of service work, especially when the work requires team collaboration, contributes to the effectiveness of the organization. It is a needed skill. As one caseworker reports, The best thing—I love the people I work with. I think we've got a fantastic group of people who really are pretty dedicated to what they do and who think that it's important. And I know, in some cases, they have given up other job offers and stuff to stay here because they… they really care about what happens. And so I think that's the best part.
5. Workers exerting emotional labor worry that their work hardens them. Workers, even those who report that they are good at performing emotional labor, express concern that their work experience may affect them personally. They recognize the corrosive effect that their emotionally intense jobs can have or are already having on them and their private relationships. They begin to fear that the constant exposure to emotionally difficult situations and the constant need to respond to others' needs will make them hard and cold. Investigating service workers' estrangement from the authentic self was the impetus for Hochschild's (1983) seminal study, which planted the seeds of inquiry for subsequent generations of scholars. Hochschild was inspired by Marx's (1844/1964) theory of the alienation of labor. Marx wrote that the laborer becomes disaffected from the very means by which he or she works: a pair of hands or a strong back during the day and an authentic person only at night. Although contemporary theory rejects such stark distinctions, research on emotional labor finds that human services workers struggle with their identities as workers and individuals (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003). At what point does the human service worker become the human servant? The calluses—visible on the manual worker's hands yet invisible on the human service worker's identity—are necessary to accomplish human service work yet become thick and dull emotional responses at work and beyond. Many human service workers fear that the emotional hardness necessary for their work will affect their personal life.
6. Workers exerting emotional labor do not experience more stress than those who have less emotionally demanding jobs. Although this observation contradicts the widely held assumption that emotional labor is, per se, a cause of stress and burnout, comparisons with other types of work suggest that this is not the case. Emotional labor has its rewards and stresses, which are not that different from work that is less emotionally demanding. Guy et al. (2008) have shown, however, that when workers must stifle their feelings or act one way when feeling another—the false face of emotional labor—they are at great risk for increased stress and burnout. However, horrible situations and those that require great emotional strength are not inherently stressful. In the words of a social worker at OPG, We've managed to get the state to close down some really horrible group homes and, um, we've managed to have children removed from some really terrible foster homes in the same, you know, very awful conditions. Those are the things that you do feel good about, and there are enough of those all the time that it counterbalances the other.
Unanswered Questions: Can You Train and Develop Skill in Emotional Labor?

Research on emotional labor in human service organizations and public service in general is still in its early stage of development. Emotional labor is an issue that has long been recognized as essential to human service work but has been largely overlooked by researchers. There are several important subject areas for the management of human service organizations that call out for more research. What sort of preservice and mid-service training would prepare human service workers for the emotional demands of their work? Like many skills, emotional labor is a blend of talent, temperament, knowledge, and skill. Once emotional labor is recognized as an essential aspect of human service work and organizations acknowledge that skills in emotion work require initial sharpening and continual honing, then human service managers must focus attention on how to help workers identify their weaknesses and strengths in performing emotional labor. What sort of training is necessary to develop and sustain these skills and how can organizations properly distinguish poor from strong performance of emotional labor? Furthermore, it is essential that human service organizations develop ways to adequately reward requisite emotional labor.

Emotional labor requires rapid and subtle insight, which complicates the issues of training and rewards. In the words of a trainer for 911 call takers, “You have two calls that are similar, but you never have two calls that are alike. What may work on this person may not work on that person.” An adult who is hysterical requires directive calming, while a child who is apprehensive requires solicitous patience. There is no time for a careful assessment. The call taker must make a rapid and emotionally accurate response and must have the repertoire of appropriate emotional responses to handle such diverse situations; the call taker who is skilled at handling adults but not children cannot say, “Please hold,” and forward the call to the “child in distress” expert.

Another complication is diversity. Do gender, race, or religion and the match between worker and client on gender, race, or religion make a difference in the performance of emotion work? If, for example, women are better at performing caritas than men or women can more easily make emotional connections to other women, are there implications for training and skill assessment?

Unanswered Questions: How Do You Manage Emotional Labor?

Many different jobs require emotional labor, and each type of job has its own emotion work requirements and comes with varying levels of available feedback and closure. This raises a central management question: What screening procedures are helpful in determining which job applicants will perform better in specific jobs? We cannot assume that all jobs requiring emotional labor will involve the same stresses and demands or require the same skills. Matching workers to jobs remains a difficult task, in part because emotional labor is so varied and subtle. Corrections staff may work with the same prisoners for months and years, enabling them to gain some understanding of their emotional needs. Police officers, especially in urban areas, must make rapid responses to strangers. Similarly, child care workers may work with families and children for extended periods, allowing time for progress, feedback, and the ability to modulate emotional responses based on more intimate understandings of individuals and situations. Crisis line workers have only fleeting moments to respond and rarely learn the results of their interventions. Enduring contact with a client does not, however, reduce the emotional demands of work: Such enduring relationships have their own unique stresses and demands. A protective services investigator describes the difficulty in finding the right person for the job:

There are [formal job] requirements,… but in our job it's hard to measure. You've got to have dedication. You've really got to care to do this job and to continue to do it; you can't really measure that in a job application. You can't measure whether someone is flexible with their emotion. And in my job, that's the best way to know if someone's gonna be successful. In the office, it is one thing but just how do they react to people out on the street and how they're able to communicate, that's the key. You've got to be able to communicate to people from every walk of life.

Few human service organizations use performance appraisal instruments that acknowledge, much less reward, emotion work skills and accomplishments (Mastracci, Newman, & Guy, 2006). Little research has been done on how to identify and measure effective emotional labor and how to distinguish effective from ineffective emotion work from other kinds of contributions. If we take seriously the centrality and value of emotional labor, then it must become institutionalized in our performance appraisal systems. It is equally unclear what forms of supervision work best for jobs that require high levels of emotional labor. Peer counseling or one-on-one support may prove more effective for those engaged in emotionally demanding and draining work than typical rule-based, top-down supervision. Is team management more effective than hierarchy for emotional labor? How do supervisors develop accountability procedures and reporting that ensure that the emotional labor of frontline workers corresponds and contributes to organizational goals? Emotional labor is often personal and too often unseen, making it difficult to incorporate emotion work within the supervisory and accountability systems deemed essential in all human service organizations.

Summary

Once a month I do the death review. It's my least favorite thing to do. Literally, it's an entire afternoon of hearing about one dead baby after another dead baby…. I can say there've been plenty of times when I've thought I have to quit this job: This is making me nuts. But somehow, I always come back. But it makes a difference that I am there, and that is worth it all. And how could I ever survive in a job where I'm making widgets?

These reflections by a worker in the OPG capture much of what we are learning about emotional labor. Emotional labor provides personal rewards and personal anguish; often, reward and anguish are tightly bound and associated with the same task, such as the death review. Emotional labor is an essential, if inadequately recognized and rewarded, dimension of human service work. It takes talent, skill, and experience and often requires matching an emotional response to the needs of an individual client. In many situations, emotional labor, like other highly developed skills, requires such rapid judgments that it appears natural or instinctual. Both men and women acknowledge the centrality of emotional labor to their human service work, but emotional labor is often associated with “women's work.” As such, emotional labor is often overlooked and underrewarded. We have learned that emotional labor can create stress and is often emotionally draining. Nonetheless, many workers find emotional labor a source of deep personal satisfaction, and burnout is more common when workers must express emotions, whether positive or negative, that they do not feel.

It should come as no surprise that human service workers seek consistency between their own feelings and those demanded by their job. The avoidance of cognitive dissonance has long been documented (Rokeach & Rothman, 1965). Current research suggests that the same is true for emotional dissonance (Guy et al., 2008). For example, workers who are not sympathetic to the passivity of many victims of domestic violence—“Why doesn't she just leave? I would”—may not be a good match for a family violence center. A worker who has nothing but disdain for alcoholics should not be working in an alcohol treatment center. Each of these situations would demand that the worker respond in an inauthentic way, which creates emotional dissonance, a precondition for ineffective encounters and burnout. (It is, of course, possible that such workers may, with training or experience, come to have a different emotional response. Emotions are not immutable.) On the other hand, workers who are empathetic with the circumstances of the abused woman or the substance abuser may be in a better position to foster change. Although working with such clients will always be emotionally draining, at the end of the day workers who can make the empathetic connection feel that their work is worthwhile and constructive.

When Peter Drucker (1985) introduced the notion of knowledge work, he explained that it would be different from industrial work in part because employers could not “own” their workers' means of production. This is also true with emotional labor. Workers, not organizations, have the talent and skill to do emotion work, although organizations, through screening, training, supervising, and rewarding, can encourage or discourage the development of emotional labor skills among its workforce. While most organizations recruit staff based on a list of required and preferred skills, emotion work requires attention to the worker as a person, not just a skill set. This move from a “task-in-job” hiring to “person-in-job” defies standard processes for evaluating applicants and workers. Much has yet to be learned about the types of emotional labor that are required by various jobs. In many human service organizations, job analysis should incorporate emotional labor requirements. Learning more about emotional labor will benefit human service organizations, workers, and clients. It has been overlooked too long.

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