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Guided by Habermas’s three cognitive interests, this paper reviews the studies on school leaders’ emotional labor. It seeks to provide a typology of how researchers inquire about school leaders’ emotional labor by focusing on different understandings, topics and characteristics.

This is a narrative review with 38 studies finally selected for analysis. Guided by Habermas’s three cognitive interests, all the studies were examined carefully and were found to fall into different clusters of understanding of school leaders’ emotional labor.

The review revealed three understandings of school leaders’ emotional labor, namely instrumental understanding, practical understanding and emancipatory understanding. The instrumental understanding treats school leaders’ emotional labor as a tool to effectively control the schools; the practical understanding regards emotional labor as a way to build and maintain relationships and as the process of meaning-making; the emancipatory understanding perceives emotional labor as a site for school leaders’ reflection and action for achieving a more just and self-determined leadership.

This review contributes to the growing literature on school leadership and emotional labor by providing a theory-guided typology and synthesis of the existing understanding of school leaders’ emotional labor, which lays a knowledge base and points out directions for future scholarly inquiries. It also provides practical suggestions for educational policy, school leaders’ practice and leadership training.

This paper seeks to argue that leaders perform emotional labor whenever they display emotions in an attempt to influence their subordinates' moods and motivations.

This is a conceptual paper that integrates the literature on leadership with the research on emotional labor.

This paper develops 15 propositions that distinguish emotional labor performed by leaders from that performed by front‐line service workers.

The paper suggests that leading with emotional labor is a fruitful research topic, and that considerable research could be done in this area.

Instead of conducting business in a non‐emotional, “business‐like manner”, leaders would benefit by expressing their emotions in the workplace. Emotionally expressive leaders are more charismatic and are better motivators.

This is the first paper to develop a theoretical model that describes how leaders perform emotional labor; thus the propositions are original.

Previous research has focused mainly on the antecedents and consequences of service employees’ emotional labor during the enactment of service roles, with little attention having been paid to how perceptions of leaders’ emotional labor are related to followers’ job outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to propose a model in which followers’ perceptions of the uses of emotional labor by leaders toward customers influence followers’ job performance in their service encounters.

Working with a sample of 268 medical service employees in South Korea, structural equation modeling was employed to test the research hypotheses.

The results indicate that perceptions of leaders’ deep acting toward customers are positively related to followers’ perceptions of authentic leadership. Second, followers’ perceptions of authentic leadership are positively associated with their identification with and trust in their leaders. Finally, followers’ identification with and trust in their leaders is positively related to their job performance.

The research shows that leaders’ use of deep acting toward customers has a positive effect on followers’ job outcomes. Thus, service firms should consider training programs, mindfulness and policy changes regarding display rules at the organizational level so that service employees are encouraged to use deep acting with customers by empathizing with the customers’ needs, while regulating their inner feelings.

The current study broadens the conceptual work and empirical studies in the emotional labor literature related to the service sector by presenting a fundamental mechanism for the effect of perceptions of leaders’ use of emotional labor toward customers on service employees’ job performance. This study is the first to provide an empirical test of how leaders’ emotional labor is related to followers’ job performance.

Drawing on the contingency perspective of leadership, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relation between transactional leadership and team innovativeness by focusing on the moderating role of emotional labor and the mediating role of team efficacy. The authors propose and empirically test the hypothesis that the relation between transactional leadership and team innovativeness is negative when the level of emotional labor is high whereas the relation is positive when the level of emotional labor is low. The authors further examine the process mechanism of this interactive effect by testing the mediating role of team efficacy.

In total, 90 Chinese work teams, comprising 462 members and 90 team leaders, were surveyed. Hierarchical regression analyses were performed and moderated causal steps approach applied to test the authors' mediated moderation model.

As predicted, transactional leadership was negatively associated with team innovativeness when emotional labor was high whereas the association was positive when emotional labor was low. Team efficacy mediated the interactive effects of transactional leadership and emotional labor on team innovativeness.

The paper contributes to the contingency perspective on transactional leadership and team innovativeness by identifying emotional labor as an important moderator and team efficacy as a critical mediator, yet methodological limitations do exist in the study. Although data were collected from multiple sources to avoid common method variance, the design was cross‐sectional, which limits the authors' ability to make robust inferences of causality.

By examining both the moderating and mediating effects, the paper contributes to uncovering the black box in which transactional leadership exerts an influence on team innovativeness.

Faced with dynamic and challenging environments, organizations today expect all their leaders, including their women leaders, to be highly intrapreneurial. However, intrapreneurship is traditionally perceived to be a masculine activity. In order to appear intrapreneurial, women leaders consciously behave like men and suppress their feminine characteristics. This results in “emotional labor” that causes undue stress, emotional exhaustion, and burnout. Organizations can help intrapreneurial women leaders succeed by a combination of gender-related sensitization, focused training, setting up sharing and communication platforms, encouraging self-support groups and providing formal and informal mentorship to their women employees.

We carried out qualitative research which involved 31 in depth semi-structured in-person interviews (including 11 repeat interviews) with 20 women leaders from seven large organizations from the Indian IT industry. The interviewees had 15 years of average work experience, were in the 35-50 years age group, and held senior management functional or project management responsibilities. The interviews were typically 60 minutes each. The researcher took detailed notes, and subsequently, manually carried out multiple levels and multiple rounds of coding (initially open-coding followed by focused coding) to identify and abstract the themes and categories.

Our study identified that women leaders who are expected to behave as intrapreneurs, face “emotional labor” which results in stress, emotional exhaustion and burnout. To help women leaders succeed, a well-defined set of organizational interventions including gender sensitization, training, sharing & communication platforms, self-support groups, and formal and informal mentoring are useful.

To increase the generalizability of our study beyond the Indian cultural context and beyond the IT industry, future researchers may carry out both qualitative and larger sample quantitative studies in other countries, and draw upon data from multiple industries. The issues arising out of emotional labor of women intrapreneurial leaders are likely to be present in a wide range of industries and cultural contexts. However, there may be nuanced contextual differences that need further exploration. Future research can build on our findings and explore moderators, contingencies, and boundary conditions that affect the suitability of organizational interventions that we have suggested.

Emotional well-being of women intrapreneurial leaders would help them take innovative organizational initiatives, and make the organization strategically agile. To help women leaders be intrapreneurial, organizations need many interventions and need to provide the required supporting infrastructure.

Ways to resolve gender-related issues in workplaces are suggested.

Our study is valuable as it simultaneously considers two strategic organizational objectives of intrapreneurship and gender diversity of leadership teams. The paper provides useful prescriptions for organizations to help women intrapreneurial leaders succeed. This will help organizations that are facing dynamic external environments become innovative and strategically agile.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between perceptions of leader emotion regulation strategies and followers’ organizational commitment. In particular, this study using social exchange theory as a framework examines the association between leader surface and deep acting and followers’ affective, normative and continuance organizational commitment.

Survey data were collected from 323 employees of five service sector organizations in Anhui province, China. Further, PLS-SEM technique was used to perform quantitative analysis.

The findings suggest that leader surface acting has a negative influence on followers’ affective commitment, normative commitment and continuance commitment. In contrast, leader deep acting has a positive influence on followers’ affective commitment, normative commitment and continuance commitment.

The findings suggest that leaders should be careful in managing their affective display. They may like to improve their followers’ affective commitment, normative commitment and continuance commitment by using deep acting. In contrast, leader surface acting may weaken their followers’ affective commitment, normative commitment and continuance commitment.

This study extends the social exchange theory in the context of emotional labor by examining the link between perceptions of leader surface and deep emotional strategies and followers’ affective, normative and continuance organizational commitment.

Coronavirus (COVID) has had a massive impact on the health systems of many nations including Australia. Nurse leaders have, as part of their leadership and management roles, had to manage the emotional responses of the people around nurse leaders . The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of nurse leaders who have held management roles during the health services crisis that has resulted from the COVID pandemic and to look at the emotional work nurse leaders have engaged in and the impact emotional work has had on nurse leaders' emotional well-being.

The study adopted a social constructionist approach and employed unstructured interviews to generate data.

The findings demonstrate that the nurse leaders were experiencing increased emotional exhaustion, which could be construed as a breach of psychological safety, as nurse leaders engaged in more surface acting. This has negatively impacted their lives outside of work. The study recommends that nurse leaders receive support through counselling and reflective practice activities. Consideration also should be given to renumerating nurse leaders appropriately for the emotional work nurse leaders perform.

The structural issues endemic in the industry need to be addressed. Human resource management professionals, senior managers and hospital boards are charged with ensuring that the organisations are safe and healthy workplaces. This includes addressing issues that impact psychological health. If nurse leaders must undertake work that impacts negatively on nurse leaders' mental well-being and personal lives, then appropriate safeguards need to be put in place. The scope of the study was small, as the study is limited by the number of interviewees, the number of study sites and the sites' geographical location. Consequently, limited claims are made about the generalisability of the findings or the findings' transferability to other contexts.

The findings overwhelmingly support the contention that we need to support nurse leaders in the vital role they play through engaging in surface acting in the workplace. The role needs to be recognised and valued as a critical part of the nurse leader role. The contribution the role makes to the welfare of others in the organisation needs to be acknowledged. Given the emotional and personal price that nurse leaders play for surface acting, organisations need to provide genuine support in the form of counselling and the introduction of opportunities for reflective practice.

The study suggests that nurse leaders need to be paid for emotional labour (EL) generally and surface acting in particular. The recognition of the value of caring work must go beyond symbols such as the Year of the Nurse and be rewarded financially.

The experience of nurse leaders using surface acting has received little attention and this is the first study to look at this particular phenomenon during COVID.

Emotions and emotional labor play a crucial role in professional interactions. Due to the increasing participation share of women managers in the workforce, especially in the customer-oriented service context, this study adopts a multilevel approach and mobilizes person–job fit theory to investigate whether the emotional labor of female managers influences the association between customer orientation and job satisfaction in frontline employees in a services setting.

The participants were 124 immediate female managers working in bank branches and their 896 customer-facing employees in China.

The results show that the positive relationship between customer orientation and job satisfaction in frontline employees is strengthened by increases in female managers' deep acting, but it is weakened with the increase in their surface acting.

The study findings provide support for scholars and financial service organizations as they seek to better understanding the dynamics behind the mobilization of women's emotions and their extent. In term of limitations, the data were taken from a single type of organization located in the northern cities of China, so it can be expected that the findings of this study will not generalize to all contexts.

This paper is the first to investigate female managers' emotional labor employing a cross-level analysis in financial services setting.

The purpose of this paper was to conduct a critical analysis of the origins and implementation of problem‐based learning in educational administration as a window into the limitations of this approach and more generally administrator preparation.

The author reviewed the published work of the originator from 1970‐2009, as well as his preparation program for principals, and evaluated his approach primarily in light of two perspectives, emotional labor and positive emotions. The paper probes the utility of using these sociological and psychological perspectives in studying and understanding the emotional side of administration through interviews with principals.

The major finding of this analysis was to question whether sufficient attention is being paid to the emotional aspects of administration in problem‐based learning in particular and administrator preparation programs more generally. The analysis reveals several areas where more attention should be paid, and provides some insight into the nature of mental and emotional labor of principals.

The paper combines two theoretical approaches in a novel way to raise a series of questions that can be used to evaluate programs for preparing administrators in terms of a critical, but for the most part neglected, area – the emotional side of administration. For those who choose to incorporate this facet of administration into their preparation program, the author describes an approach that might be used.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how emotional labor strategies (deep and surface acting) impact engagement through stress via two different emotional displays (suppressing negative emotions and expressing positive emotions) in coworker-to-coworker relationships.

This study used psychological and temporal separation techniques to survey hotel managers (Study 1) and hospitality students with frontline service jobs (Study 2).

Across both samples, the results showed that surface acting was related to suppressing negative emotions, which was positively related to stress, deep acting was related to expressing positive emotions, which was negatively related to stress, and stress was negatively related to engagement, suggesting that emotional labor affects engagement through either deep acting or surface acting and their related emotional displays.

The results show that hospitality employees either genuinely express positive emotions as a strategy to deep act or suppress negative emotions as a strategy to surface act with coworkers. Both emotional displays were related to engagement, suggesting that employers should alter expectations for emotional displays among coworkers and train employees how to manage their emotions to have a positive impact on engagement.

The unique contribution of the current paper is showing how emotional labor is related to engagement in the context of coworker-to-coworker emotional labor, which is rarely found in customer-based emotional labor. The results also provide a better understanding of how surface and deep acting are used in a hospitality context, because the measures of surface and deep acting usually focus on broad emotions rather than discrete emotions.