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Display rules are formal and informal norms that regulate the expression of workplace emotion. Organizations impose display rules to meet at least three objectives: please customers, maintain internal harmony, and promote employee well-being. Despite these valid intentions, display rules can engender emotional labor, a potentially deleterious phenomenon. We review three mechanisms by which emotional labor can create worker alienation, burnout, stress, and low performance. Though not as widely discussed, emotional labor sometimes has propitious consequences. We discuss the potential benefits of emotional labor as well.

The purpose of this study is to provide preliminary insights into the relationships between self-monitoring, emotional expressivity, emotional labor, felt leader authenticity, and authentic leadership (AL) within a unique context – West Texas Baptist congregations. Using a sample of 40 Baptist pastors, we employed survey research methods and correlational analyses to explore the focal relationships. Our results revealed that self-monitoring is positively correlated with surface acting, yet negatively associated with AL, within our sample of West Texas Baptist pastors. Emotional expressivity is negatively related to surface acting, but not deep acting, and positively related to genuine emotional displays. We also found that surface acting is negatively associated with genuine emotion displays and felt authenticity, while felt authenticity and AL are positively correlated. However, no relationships between self-monitoring, deep acting, felt authenticity, and AL were revealed. Thus, we identified cases where leader authenticity may be threatened within an organizational context with strong emotional display rules, suggesting a boundary condition for AL. Additionally, we advance propositions gleaned from our research regarding the influence of the omnibus (e.g., community religiosity) and discrete context on leader emotional labor and authenticity. We conclude with practical recommendations for leaders seeking to balance authenticity with emotional display rules associated with unique roles and contexts, as well as recommendations for scholars seeking to conduct research in such settings. We also provide candid insights regarding the challenges we encountered in researching leader authenticity within a highly religious context.

Previous research on emotional labor has typically been conducted at the individual level of analysis, despite the fact that many organizations have incorporated work teams into their business model. The use of work teams turns emotional management into a group task on which employees work as a collective. The present chapter proposes a conceptual model that describes the antecedents and consequences of team-level emotional labor. We propose that work groups often impose positive display rules (express integrative emotion) and negative display rules (suppress differentiating emotions) on their members. Positive display rules generally trigger group-level deep acting, whereby teammates seek to change their internal feelings. Negative display rules generally trigger surface acting, whereby teammates retain their actual emotions but do not actually express differentiating feelings. These two dimensions of emotional labor, for their part, impact emotional exhaustion. Deep acting one's positive emotions lowers emotional exhaustion and surface acting increases it. We discuss the consequences of our model for workplace behavior, such as performance. We also discuss how the relationships involving emotional labor change when one considers these constructs at the group-level of analysis.

Sustainability is an emotional issue. It is also an issue that is gaining prominence in organizational agendas. In this chapter, we outline a model to explain how employees perceive change agents working to implement sustainability initiatives in organizations. Using this model, we argue that organizational support for sustainability can influence how employees respond to sustainability messages. We further argue that the intensity of emotions that change agents display, and how appropriate those emotions are within the organizational context, will influence how employees perceive those individuals and the success of their efforts to influence green outcomes.

We extend the Dual Threshold Model of emotions (DTM: Geddes & Callister, 2007) to assess the impact of displays of emotional intensity on achieving sustainability goals. Our model links emotional propriety to change agent success. By exploring variations of the DTM in terms of contextual factors and emotional intensity, our model elaborates on the dynamic nature of emotional thresholds.

Using our framework, change agents may be able to improve their influence by matching the emotional intensity of their messages to the relevant display rules for that organization. That is, change agents who are perceived to express emotion within the thresholds of propriety can enhance their success in implementing green outcomes.

This chapter examines sustainability initiatives at the interpersonal behavior level. We combine aspects of organizational behavior, emotion in organizations, and organizations and the natural environment to create a new model for understanding change agent success in corporate sustainability.

This paper aims to portray that, while particular types of emotional displays are often essential for team and service work, the negative consequences of conforming with display rules need to be weighed against their true necessity. This research seeks to examine their necessity in terms of the expectations that people have of the emotional displays of others, so that potentially stressful emotional work can be targeted appropriately within organizations.

This quantitative study uses a questionnaire approach to assess the expectations that 121 UK and 101 US participants have towards the emotional displays of various service providers and work colleagues.

Expectations of emotional display were shown to differ across cultures, between jobs and roles within an organization, and between males and females.

The implications for managers and practitioners centre on the value placed on encouraging warm emotional displays at various levels within the organization. The findings suggest that these should not be limited to frontline communications and this may impact on selection and training procedures. Managers will be better able to target emotion work within those interactions where such performance is most expected and required.

Whilst a great deal of research has been conducted into the emotional displays and emotional labour performance of employees, little has examined the expectations that individuals have about these displays. This is an important gap since such information allows practitioners to better target their emotion management strategies in the right areas and limit the potentially harmful consequences to health of chronic emotion work where it is less necessary.

This paper aims to explore service encounters from a social behavior perspective. By proposing that employees’ emotional labor strategies are influenced by customer displays of emotion, this paper answers calls to investigate the reciprocal nature of service interactions and the importance of taking both customers and service providers into account when delivering high-quality service is the goal.

The sample consisted of 121 dyads of customers and service employees from hairstyling salons. Data were collected from observations of the customers’ emotional displays, self-report surveys administered to the service employees measuring strategies of emotional labor and self-report surveys administered to the customers to assess their rapport with the service providers and their loyalty intentions.

Length of acquaintance was positively related to customers’ positive display, which mediated the relationship between length of acquaintance and employee-customer rapport. Customers’ positive display was negatively related to employees’ deep acting (i.e. modifying inner feelings) but not to surface acting (i.e. modifying superficial expressions). Customers’ positive display and employees’ surface acting were related to loyalty intentions through the mediation of rapport.

This study provides a better understanding of the customer’s role as the target, and a possible cause of emotional regulation among service employees. It underscores the role of service relationships in customers’ emotional behavior and customer-related outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether emotional deviance in response to customer aggression and employees’ feelings of anger is likely to be influenced by perceived job autonomy. To date, studies on emotional labor have focused primarily on emotional regulation strategies. Little is known about the factors that may serve to increase emotional deviance (i.e. situations in which felt and expressed emotions match but are at odds with organizational display rules).

Three samples of service workers were recruited from northern Israel, and data were collected using self-reported questionnaires. Research hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression analyses.

Study 1 revealed that under conditions of frequent exposure to customer aggression, more perceived job autonomy was associated with more frequent instances of emotional deviance. The results of Study 2 and Study 3 demonstrated that the relationship between anger and emotional deviance was stronger for employees reporting high levels of perceived job autonomy.

Given the potentially negative impact of emotional deviance on customer satisfaction, organizations should find a balance between satisfying employees’ desire for control and discretion and ensuring employee compliance with display rules.

This study contributes to the existing literature by pointing out that job autonomy may have a “dark side”, in the sense that it provides employees with a certain level of perceived freedom, which might then be extended to include freedom from rule compliance, especially when negative emotions are experienced.

The concept of emotional labor refers to the management of emotions in interaction with customers. This study aims to suggest an integrative definition of emotional labor. It develops a conceptual framework that helps organize and synthesize key insights from the literature, in an interactional and multi-level perspective.

This integrated framework consists in a mapping of key research themes resulting from a systematic literature review, which includes research in sales and marketing. As critical affective processes in sales have not been studied sufficiently, both in business-to-business and business-to-customer selling, this review also incorporates works in other research fields.

Sales representatives’ emotional labor must be considered as a bi-directional interaction with the customer in a multi-level perspective. Moreover, emotional labor has rather negative consequences for the salesperson (e.g. burnout and job stress), but may have positive sales and customer outcomes. Findings suggest that the expression of genuine emotions should be used during sales interactions. In addition, organizations should prevent customers’ negative behaviors (e.g. mistreatment).

Emotional labor key practical implications with regard to several management functions such as the recruitment, performance management and training (Ashkanasy and Daus, 2002) of the sales representatives.

Research on emotional labor in a sales ecosystem is scarce. It has largely covered service industry employees in contact with customers, but has not paid enough attention to sales representatives (Mikeska et al., 2015). The proposed integrated framework concerning emotional labor focuses on the bi-directional interaction between the sales representatives and their customers.

In this chapter, we reanalyze the conceptual map of emotional labor in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the construct. Our starting point is Ashkanasy's (2003) five-level model of emotions in organizations, which places emotional labor at the midpoint (Level 3): the interpersonal level. We argue here that emotional labor is a complex construct that can be viewed from different levels of organizational analysis. For example, it can also be considered as an organizational level variable (Level 5) and from the within person perspective (Level 1). More particularly, we posit that recent fragmentation of the construct of emotional labor in the literature has tended to divert the focus from its primary purpose: a value adding activity for the organization. In this chapter, therefore, we describe and discuss horizontal and vertical relationships between the key elements of the conceptual map of emotional labor and suggest directions for future research.

The emotions of the aspirant leader are underexplored. In this chapter, we detail how aspirants experience the transition from teacher to leader and report on the kinds of emotional labour associated with the transition. This was examined during events of high emotional arousal for 130 school aspirants: when they felt professionally wounded, either by colleagues, leaders, parents or students. During a time of wounding, emotional work and emotional labour hinged on the dissonance between ‘display rules’ of the school and what aspirants’ actually felt. Exploring the wounding stories revealed common display rules, which were often broken. Breaking these rules always had consequences and emotional correlates. The most prevalent form of emotional labour was surface acting. The final discovery was the resilience of the aspirants as they recovered. Invariably, aspirants progressed through an emotion cycle of Regrouping, Recovery and Resolution. The quality of collegial relationships was the key to resolving the woundings.