Emotional Labor

Emotional labor is the act of managing one's own emotions and the emotions of others to meet job expectations, requiring the capacity to manage and produce a feeling in order to fulfill a job's emotional requirements. Workers are expected to regulate their personas in interactions with customers, co-workers, clients and managers, which includes both the display of emotion that is not actually felt and the suppression of emotion that is felt but not expressed, producing a feeling in the customer or client that lets the organization succeed. Roles identified as requiring it include education, public administration, law, childcare, health care, social work, hospitality, media, advocacy, aviation and espionage, and the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who first defined the concept, identified three regulation strategies workers use to produce it: cognitive, bodily and expressive.