Effects of emotional labour on exhaustion and job satisfaction of workers in Spain

Abstract

The emotional dimension has been incorporated into the study of work organisations for more than three decades with the pioneering research of Arlie Hochschild, in which the (negative) impact of emotional labour on the health and well-being of workers was ana-lysed. Emotional labour emphasises the relational aspect in the workplace, as it is based on the worker’s handling of feelings as an imperative in the processes of interaction with oth-ers. This new labour demand plays an important role in exhaustion and job satisfaction, but it is a field that is still little explored. The research we present here aims to enrich this area of study through a twofold objective. On the one hand, we operationalise emotional labour as a multidimensional concept, through the construction of an Emotional Demand Index that encompasses interaction, emotional management and visualisation rules (Wharton, 2009) and, on the other, we analyse its influence on job satisfaction and exhaustion in the working population in Spain, using autonomy and work intensity as control variables. The methodology used is quantitative in nature and the data are obtained from the European Working Conditions Survey (2015). The results show that emotional demand has a negative influence on well-being variables.