Emotional labor and employee outcomes: A meta‐analysis

Abstract

Abstract While there is agreement among scholars that people‐work requires emotional labor, there is still some uncertainty about the consequences of emotional labor for employees. This article conducts a random‐effects meta‐analysis including 545 correlations across 175 primary studies to explore the relationship between emotional labor, burnout, and job satisfaction. The meta‐analysis suggests that emotional labor can be both harmful and beneficial to employees, depending on the emotional labor strategy used, that is, surface acting or deep acting. In addition, the meta‐regression shows that effect sizes between emotional labor and employee outcomes (i.e., burnout and job satisfaction) differ in collectivist and individualist cultures. The article concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for research and practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 94 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.