Differential responses to emotional job demands: A review of the literature on individual characteristics and emotional labor

Abstract

This article aimed to describe how the personal characteristics of employees shape their responses towards emotionally demanding situations at work. To this end, a systematic review of articles published in high-impact journals was conducted. The results reveal that personality traits, emotional skills, and work motives are the main individual characteristics that have been examined in the emotional labor literature. Moreover, the findings indicate that these individual characteristics play a fundamental role in the emotional labor process by affecting the perceptions of employees regarding emotional rules, the emotion-regulation strategies used by them, and the effects of regulatory processes on emotional display, well-being, and performance.