Emotion work as a source of stress: The concept and the development of an instrument.

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Emotion Work as a
Source of Stress:
The Concept and
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Dieter Zapf, Christoph Vogt, Claudia
Seifert, Heidrun Mertini & Amela Isic

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Heidrun Mertini & Amela Isic (1999): Emotion Work as a Source of
Stress: The Concept and Development of an Instrument, European
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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF WORK AND ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1999, 8 (3), 371–400
EMOTION WORK 371

Emotion Work as a Source of Stress:
The Concept and Development of an Instrument
Dieter Zapf, Christoph Vogt, Claudia Seifert, Heidrun Mertini,
and Amela Isic
J.W. Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany

This article discussed emotion work as a neglected area in organizational stress
research. Emotion work (emotional labour) was defined as the emotional
regulation required of the employees in the display of organizationally desired
emotions. Based on the existing literature on emotion work and action theory,
emotional regulation requirements (sub-scales: the requirement to express positive
emotions; the requirement to express and handle negative emotions, the
requirement to be sensitive to clients’ emotions, and the requirement to show
sympathy), emotional regulation possibilities (control), and emotional regulation
problems (emotional dissonance) were differentiated. Questionnaires were
developed and applied in a sample of employees in a handicapped children’s home
(N = 83), in the hotel business (N = 175) and employees working in call-centres
(N = 250). Scales showed satisfactory reliabilities. Exploratory and confirmatory
factor analyses revealed minor problems with discriminant validity of the scales.
Construct validation showed that the emotion work scales were both positively and
negatively related with psychological health.

Psychological stress research in organizations comprises a substantial body of
research spanning the last 20 years, and demonstrating significant relations
between psychological stressors and strains. In 1989 the European Council
passed various laws to improve the protection of workers’ health and promote
measures of health and well-being. In many European countries, these laws still
have to be translated into national law. In Germany, this was achieved in 1996 by
passing a new law for occupational health and safety (“Arbeitsschutzgesetz”).
The new law addressed physical stressors such as carrying heavy weights or one-
sided and unusual body positions, environmental stressors such as noise or
temperature, which have been investigated in the human factors literature, and

Requests for reprints should be addressed to D. Zapf, Department of Psychology, J.W. Goethe-
University Frankfurt, Mertonstr. 17, D-60054 Frankfurt, Germany. Email: D.Zapf@psych.uni-
frankfurt.de.
The hotel study was supported by the Berufsgenossenschaft Nahrung. Special thanks are due to
P. Bärenz and A. Landgraf.

© 1999 Psychology Press Ltd

372 ZAPF ET AL.

psychological stressors. Although the former were explicitly mentioned, the
aspects these psychological stressors should comprise were not. Most studies on
psychological stressors at work measure stressors that are related to the work
tasks and to the organization of work (cf. Kahn & Byosiere, 1992; Zapf,
Dormann, & Frese, 1996). Typical examples are quantitative and qualitative
overload or time pressure. There are only a few approaches that try to systematize
psychological job stressors based on a general framework. The most prominent
approaches use role theory to link different role demands such as role conflict,
role ambiguity and role overload to psychological stress (Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn,
Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964). Another approach is the differentiation of job
stressors according to their effect on action regulation (Frese & Zapf, 1994;

Greiner & Leitner, 1989; Semmer, 1984; Semmer, Zapf, & Dunckel, 1995, 1999;
Zapf, 1993). Basically, these stressors are of a cognitive nature, that is, working
conditions are considered to be stressful because they negatively affect various
aspects of information processing during task execution and because they require
mental effort. Examples are time pressure, interruptions, concentration
necessities or uncertainty at work. Another perspective examines psychological
stressors associated with social relations at work. Scales addressing social
stressors (Frese & Zapf, 1987) or interpersonal conflict scales (Spector, 1987)
measure conflicts, animosities, verbal aggression and unjust behaviour at work.
The theories underlying these kinds of stressors typically relate to conflict and
aggression.
Burnout is yet another research area that points to job requirements not
included in the concepts of psychological job stressors mentioned so far. Burnout
was first investigated in the helping professions (Maslach, 1982; Maslach &
Leiter, 1997; Schaufeli & Buunk, 1996; Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1998; Schaufeli,
Maslach, & Marek, 1993). It is argued that the personal relationships with
patients, clients, or children are very demanding and require a high amount of
empathy and emotional involvement. This is usually combined with a high
aspiration level to build up personal relationships and avoid treating other people
like objects. In these professions, the management of emotions is considered a
central part of work. Burnout is then an indication that employees are no longer
able to adequately manage their emotions when interacting with clients. It is a
syndrome consisting of three aspects: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization,
and reduced personal accomplishment (Maslach & Jackson, 1986). It is argued
that, in the long run, burnout leads to psychosomatic complaints, depression, and
other long-term stress effects. A recent meta-analysis (Lee & Ashforth, 1996) of
the existing literature found role stress to be one of the best predictors of burnout
variables. Interestingly, studies on burnout did not try to directly measure the
emotional aspects at work. Rather, these aspects were taken as a given by doing
research with samples where emotional job requirements could be taken for
granted. Instead, various job stressors, such as role conflict, role ambiguity, time
pressure, and lack of job control were measured.

EMOTION WORK 373

It is only recently that authors tried to investigate the relationships between
more direct measures of emotional aspects at work and psychological strain (e.g.
Abraham, 1998; Adelmann, 1995; Brotheridge & Lee, 1998; Grandey, 1998;
Morris & Feldman, 1997). These authors referred to the concept of emotional
labour introduced by Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983). This concept refers to the
quality of interactions between employees and clients. The term “clients” is used
to refer to any person who interacts with an employee, for example, clients,
patients, children, customers, or guests. During face-to-face interactions with
clients many employees are required to express appropriate emotions as a job
requirement, for example, waiters or flight attendants are required to be friendly
even to arrogant or aggressive customers. Hochschild drew upon the work of

Goffman (1959) to argue that people in social interactions tend to play roles and
try to create certain impressions. Impressions include the display of normatively
appropriate emotions following certain display rules. In this respect, Morris and
Feldman (1996, p. 987) defined emotional labour as the “effort, planning, and
control needed to express organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal
transactions”.
It was our intention to investigate whether job requirements that refer to the
regulation of emotions could supplement the concepts of psychological job
stressors mentioned previously that refer to the regulation of cognition or
information processing. Hochschild, as a sociologist, differentiated between
emotional labour as the exchange value of work and emotional work as the use
value. In the present context, the psychological processes, for example, the
regulation processes of work actions rather than societal and economic aspects of
labour are considered. In psychology, the term “labour” is used to describe the
division of labour, labour–management relations, conflict resolution, and
collective bargaining. The term is not used when individual behaviour and
intrapsychic concepts are involved as in the concepts of physical and mental
work demands, work motivation, work involvement, work design, etc. To be
compatible with these research areas, the term “emotion work” is preferred. In
sum, emotion work possesses the following characteristics (Hochschild, 1983;
Morris & Feldman, 1997): (1) It is a significant component of jobs that require
either face-to-face or voice-to voice interactions with clients. This refers to the
service sector, in particular human services, but also to teachers, police,
correctional workers, debt collectors, and others. It should be noted that not all
jobs that require face-to-face interactions with clients belong to the service sector
and that defining service is problematic (Nerdinger, 1994). We will use the term
“person-related work” as an umbrella term for all jobs that require face-to-face or
voice-to-voice interactions with clients. (2) Emotions in these jobs are displayed
to influence other people’s attitudes and behaviours, usually by influencing their
emotional state. For example, a child nurse may show sympathy and talk to a hurt
child in a soft calming voice to make the child stop crying and cheer her up.
(3) The display of emotions has to follow certain rules. At present, many

374 ZAPF ET AL.

companies do not have explicit display rules as a part of the organizational
culture or as part of their job descriptions, in particular not in Continental Europe.
However, mission statements of companies sometimes incorporate display rules
and there may be implicit display rules taught in one’s occupational education or
as part of one’s professional ethos, for example, in the case of a nurse (Briner,
1995). In other cases, it may be the professional experience that you can’t sell
anything if you are not polite, friendly, and helpful. Employers differ in their
attempts to control and direct how employees display emotions to clients. In
some cases, it is part of the supervisors’ jobs to take care that display rules are
observed. Increasingly, companies ask customers to evaluate whether they were
treated in a friendly manner.

A number of studies operationalized emotion work as a dichotomous variable
indicating the presence or absence of emotion work in an occupation
(Hochschild, 1983; Wharton, 1993). Hochschild suggested that emotion work
depends on the frequency of interpersonal contact between employee and client,
thus conceiving emotion work as an unidimensional construct negatively
correlated with employees’ health. Accordingly, some authors (e.g. Adelmann,
1995) operationalized one scale for emotion work. However, these studies could
not find the expected negative relations between emotion work and psychological
strain, suggesting that more differentiated concepts should be used.
Other authors have worked on the differentiation of various aspects of
emotion work, many of them referring to the seminal work of Morris and
Feldman (1996). Some started with Hochschild’s (1983) concept of emotion
management to differentiate various dimensions of emotion work (e.g. Grandy,
1998; Kruml & Geddes, 1998). Other authors focused on determinants of
emotion work in the sense of “objective” job requirements: This emphasizes that
it is not in the discretion of the employee whether or not to express certain
emotions in a job. Rather, independent of a particular worker, it is required by the
organization and may be an explicit or implicit rule.
Approaches referring to the concept of emotion management differentiated it
based on how emotion work is done. One aspect differentiates between surface
acting and deep acting. Based on Goffman (1959), Hochschild (1983) argued that
individuals permanently manage their outer demeanour to conform with
situational requirements. Most emotion theorists propose that emotions consist
of several sub-systems (see Scherer, 1997): subjective feeling, physiological
reaction patterns, and expressive behaviour, the latter including facial
expression, voice and gesture. With reference to these concepts, surface acting
means that employees try to manage the visible aspects of emotions that appear
on the “surface” to bring them in line with the organizational display rules, while
the inner feelings remain unchanged. Another concept of Hochschild is “active
deep acting” when individuals try to influence what they feel in order to
“become” the role they are asked to display. In this case, not only the expressive
behaviour but also the inner feelings are regulated. Active deep acting refers to

EMOTION WORK 375

the case where an employee has to spend effort to regulate emotions. In other
cases, an employee may automatically feel the emotion required in a particular
situation. Hochschild called such forms “passive deep acting”.
Most studies of emotion work include the concept of emotional dissonance
(e.g. Abraham, 1998; Brotheridge & Lee, 1998; Grandey, 1998; Morris &
Feldman, 1996, 1997). Emotional dissonance occurs when an employee is
required to express emotions that are not genuinely felt in the particular situation.
A person may feel nothing when a certain emotion display is required, or the
display rule may require the suppression of undesired emotions and the
expression of neutrality or a positive emotion instead of a negative one.
Emotional dissonance may originate from “faking in good faith” when the

employee accepts the underlying display rule or from “faking in bad faith” when
the feeling rule is not accepted (Hochschild. 1983; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987).
Various authors (e.g. Abraham, 1998; Adelmann, 1995) propose that faking in
bad faith has the most negative consequences.
Based on this, Grandey (1998) and Kruml and Geddes (1998) identified two
dimensions: emotional dissonance and emotional effort. Emotional dissonance
refers to Hochschild’s concept of surface acting and passive deep acting
(automatic emotion regulation), which are considered to be the opposite ends of a
continuum. If an employee spontaneously feels the emotion, emotional
dissonance is low; if he or she feels nothing or the opposite emotion, emotional
dissonance is high. Emotional effort refers to the degree to which employees
actively try to change their inner feelings to match the feelings they are expected
to express. According to Kruml and Geddes, this dimension incorporates
Hochschild’s (1983) active deep acting. Both dimensions showed a high
correlation in the studies of Grandey.
In conceptualizing emotion work as the behavioural response to variations in
the frequency, variety, intensity, and duration of interactions, Brotheridge and
Lee (1998, p. 7) used the term “emotional labour” to refer to “actions undertaken
as a means of addressing role demands”. In this sense, operationalizations of
emotion work come close to the concept of coping in stress research (Lazarus &
Folkman,1984; Semmer, 1996). The authors operationalized surface acting and
deep acting as the key constructs for emotion work. Deep acting refers to the
active attempts to align one’s felt and displayed emotion, which means that the
inner feelings have to be adapted to the emotions that have to be displayed. In
contrast, surface acting means pretending to have the emotions expected to be
displayed. In this case, employees do not try to feel the emotions they have to
display. Brotheridge and Lee considered surface acting as the manifestation and
even a proxy for emotional dissonance.
Morris and Feldman (1996) concentrated on what they called dimensions of
emotion work: the frequency of emotion display, the attentiveness to display
rules required (referring to the intensity and duration of emotion display), the
variety of emotions to be expressed, and emotional dissonance. They argued that

376 ZAPF ET AL.

all these dimensions of emotion work would increase emotional exhaustion, the
core variable of burnout.
To conclude: Most authors consider the frequency, variety, duration, and
attentiveness of emotions as dimensions of emotion work. Emotional dissonance
is viewed somewhat differently. Several authors consider it to be a result of the
determinants of emotion work (e.g. Adelmann, 1995); some authors even place it
close to the dependent variables (e.g. Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). However,
there is some agreement to define emotional dissonance as the discrepancy
between displayed and felt emotions (Brotheridge & Lee, 1998; Morris &
Feldman, 1996, 1997) and to consider it as one of the key predictors of emotional
exhaustion. Brotheridge and Lee (1998) proposed that the emotional

requirements at work do not directly lead to emotional exhaustion but may do so
through their relation with emotional dissonance.
Several attempts have been made to operationalize aspects of emotion work.
Morris and Feldman (1997) operationalized three aspects of emotion work: the
frequency of emotion work, the duration of emotion work, and emotional
dissonance. For the frequency and duration scales they did not directly refer to
emotion display but referred to the frequency and time interacting with clients,
whereas emotional dissonance items directly referred to the match between
displayed behaviour and felt emotions. Brotheridge and Lee (1998) and Grandey
(1998) followed the model proposed by Morris and Feldman (1996) and
operationalized scales for the dimensions of emotion work as frequency, variety,
attentiveness, and duration (single item), and emotional dissonance, surface
acting, and deep acting as the core variables of emotion work. In the first study of
Brotheridge and Lee (1998), a factor analysis produced four factors collapsing
emotional dissonance and surface acting into one factor, and intensity, variety,
and duration into another. The two other factors were deep acting and frequency
of emotional display. In a second study, the authors were able to distinguish
frequency, variety, intensity, and duration, and surface acting and deep acting.
Best, Downey, and Jones (1997) measured how often different emotions were
expected on the job. Using factor analyses, they found three factors representing
the expression of positive emotions, suppressing negative emotions and
expressing negative emotions, whereby the latter showed a low reliability and a
low response frequency. Abraham (1998) operationalized emotional dissonance
using items from Adelmann (1995) that referred to display rules in the
organization. She then developed identical items rephrased to reflect the degree
to which the respondents would actually show the corresponding emotions.
Difference scores of the respective items were then computed to reflect
emotional dissonance.
For the present studies we combined the literature on emotion work described
previously with action theory-based approaches in stress research (Frese & Zapf,
1994; Greiner & Leitner, 1989; Zapf, 1993). “Work” or “labour” is a
multidisciplinary concept. Hacker (1973, 1998) and Volpert (1974) argued that

EMOTION WORK 377

the psychological component of work is the work activity and from the
perspective of action theory it is the psychic regulation of work actions. Through
various cognitive processes, action theory links the objective work environment
to behaviour. To describe job requirements, three aspects are distinguished: the
regulation requirements of a task, regulation possibilities, and regulation
problems (for details, see Frese & Zapf, 1994; Zapf, 1993).
From an action-oriented perspective, regulation requirements are related to
properties of the hierarchic-sequential organization of action and comprise the
complexity of decisions, the number and connectedness of goals and sub-goals,
and the extent of conscious vs. automatic regulation processes. Regulation
possibilities refer to the concept of control. Control means having an impact on

one’s conditions and on one’s activities in correspondence with some goal.
Decision possibilities exist with regard to the sequence of the action steps, the
timeframe, and the content of goals and plans (Frese, 1987). Several authors have
operationalized various aspects of control, such as task control referring to
decision possibilities regarding the goals to be carried out, the sequence of plans
to be performed, and the sequence of feedback information processing. Time
control, for example, refers to both when and for how long a certain task is
performed (e.g. Frese & Zapf, 1994, Semmer, et al. 1995; Wall, Jackson,
Mullarkey, & Parker, 1996; Zapf, 1993). Regulation problems are an action
theory conceptualization of work stressors. The stressors are differentiated
according to how they disturb the regulation of actions (Frese & Zapf, 1994;
Greiner & Leitner, 1989; Semmer, 1984).
There is evidence that regulation requirements, regulation possibilities, and
regulation problems are differentially related to health and well-being and that
this differentiation helps to overcome a stimulus-response framework where
every characteristic of the job has negative consequences and where “doing
nothing” would be the best concept to avoid stress at work. In contrast, action
theory proposes that human beings usually try to actively cope with their
environment. In this sense, job design should support this active approach by
providing challenging (i.e. sufficiently complex) tasks (regulation requirements)
and control (regulation possibilities), but at the same time, reducing the stressors
(regulation problems). Regulation requirements are relevant to the concept of
personality enhancement (Hacker, 1973, 1998; see also Frese & Zapf, 1994).
This means that they enable one to develop cognitive and social skills, and further
satisfaction and self-esteem. They follow the person–environment fit model
(Edwards & van Harrison, 1993): They are positive as long as they are matched
by personal prerequisites and they become negative when they exceed them.
Research shows that regulation possibilities (control) typically show a direct
positive effect as well as a moderating effect between stressors and strains (e.g.
Kahn & Byosiere, 1992). In contrast, regulation problems (stressors) have
negative health effects. Stressors are in a sense independent of the person–
environment fit, because people want challenging tasks, but they do not need a

378 ZAPF ET AL.

minimal amount of conflicts, time pressure or superfluous organizational
problems to feel happy.
Using an action theory framework, the psychological focus of the present
study was on the regulation of emotion display according to a goal given by the
organization. In this sense, emotion work is part of intentional and goal-directed
behaviour. From the organization, an employee receives an order to carry out a
certain task in a certain way. This includes behaving according to the emotional
display rules of the organization. The order is then redefined into a subjective
goal (Hackman, 1970). Emotion work usually refers to a sub-goal of a higher
order goal and requires certain emotion display during an interaction with a
client. Ideally, emotion work is done in the automatic mode, that is, the emotion

is automatically shown in the social interaction as required (cf. Scherer &
Wallbott, 1990). In this sense, the concept of emotion work differs from
approaches that investigate emotions as a response to a variety of organizational
conditions (e.g. Basch & Fisher, 1998).
Emotion work poses various demands on the worker. This view considers the
job requirement aspects of emotion work and is congruent with the idea that
objective job characteristics or job stressors created by the organization affect the
workers in various ways (Frese & Zapf, 1988, 1994; Spector, 1992). This
approach conforms to the behaviour requirement approach in job analysis
research (Hackman, 1970). Because our goal was to develop an instrument that
should be used in addition to other instruments in the analysis of stress at work,
we did not intend to operationalize all aspects of emotion work separately, but we
used these concepts for the development of items. However, because of the
empirical findings of Best et al. (1997), Brotheridge and Lee (1998), and
Grandey (1998) we expected that the items of emotional requirements would
represent at least two factors, namely the frequency and the variety/intensity of
emotion work. We did not model the duration aspect. The reason is that the
emotion work components were developed in the context of stress research
where the frequency of emotion work seems to be most relevant. If intensity only
is measured there should not necessarily be a strong relation with variables such
as burnout, because the more intense emotions could be more seldom. Similarly,
if variety of emotions is measured, the problem occurs that a high variety in
general might be more stressful than a low variety but it may not occur very often.
In the present study we partly tried to circumvent this problem by asking, for
example, how often both positive and negative emotions have to be displayed.
In addition to the work of Hochschild (1983), we drew upon concepts of
emotion work that put the influence and management of clients’ emotions into
the foreground (e.g. Brucks, 1998; Strauss, Farahaugh, Suczek, & Wiener, 1980;
Strazdins, 1998). To be able to manage clients emotions, the accurate perception
of the clients’ emotions is an important prerequisite. This is also in accord with
communication psychology (Riggio, 1986) and the literature on emotional
intelligence (Goleman, 1995, 1998). Riggio operationalized basic social skills

EMOTION WORK 379

that are related to the regulation of emotions and differentiated sensitivity,
expression, and control of emotions. Expression and control refer to the
emotional requirements described previously. In addition, we operationalized
“sensitivity requirements” as the necessity to be sensitive and consider the
emotions of clients. It can be expected that sensitivity requirements are positively
correlated with emotional requirements because the expression of an emotion
during an interaction usually is dependent on the emotion of the interaction
partner. Only in short script-like interactions might a person express emotions
without trying to sense the emotion of others.
In his qualitative study on supermarket clerks’ performance, Tolich (1993)
argued that the presence or absence of control over one’s emotion display is one

of the important issues of emotion work. He differentiated regulated emotion
management from autonomous emotion management. Referring to the dif-
ferentiation of various aspects of job control (regulation possibilities) mentioned
earlier, emotion work control was operationalized as a special case of job control
with regard to the display of emotions (in the sense of Tolich’s autonomous
emotion management) and interaction control as a special case with regard to the
underlying social interactions where emotions have to be displayed. Emotion
work control refers to the extent to which an employee can decide whether or not
to show a desired emotion. Emotion work control is probably lower when display
rules have been made explicit in an organization, but this should not be
necessarily so. Waitresses in restaurants may have to follow certain display rules,
but there may be differences in how often and in what cases the waitresses are
empowered to deviate from the rules. As described previously, some authors
have operationalized emotion work by operationalizing aspects of the underlying
social situation (e.g Adelmann, 1995; Morris & Feldman, 1997). In a similar way
we operationalized the control of the social interaction, that is the degree of
influence an employee has in social interactions with clients. An example is
whether an employee can decide when to stop an interaction with a client. There
are several reasons why we included the concepts of emotion work control and
interaction control. First, they are part of the action theory framework we applied
to emotion work. Second, qualitative research done by Hochschild (1983),
Rafaeli (1989) and Tolich (1993) pointed to the importance of this concept.
Third, the study of Erickson (1991, cited in Abraham, 1998) showed some
evidence that the moderating effect of job control applied when emotional
dissonance is involved and that this effect might be even stronger when the
control concept is matched to the stressor (cf. the analogy of the match-
hypothesis of stressors and social support of Cohen & Wills, 1985).
Finally, emotional dissonance was considered as an emotion regulation
problem. As in most of the other approaches, it is defined as the mismatch
between felt emotions and the organizationally desired expression of these
emotions. We considered emotional dissonance as an external demand rather
than a reaction to emotion display or a behavioural strategy. One could argue

380 ZAPF ET AL.

that, given a certain requirement for frequency and content (positive or negative
emotion), it should then depend on the employee and his or her personality to
what extent he or she feels in line with the required emotions. In this sense,
emotional dissonance would be a stress reaction and a first sign of emotional
exhaustion. However, there are qualitative differences in social situations that are
not sufficiently described by the parameters for display rules. This is because the
display rules describe the desired state of emotion display, but they do not
comprise anything about how often individuals are exposed to situations where
they have to show the required emotions. Moreover, they do not reflect other
factors, namely how positive or negative the social interaction is, which may
influence what people feel and whether this fits to the emotion required by the

display rule for this particular situation. Compare, for example, a nurse in a
children’s hospital and a nurse in a retirement home. The display rules of
showing friendliness and empathy may be the same, and frequency and duration
of interactions may be similar, leading to similar required display rates of
positive emotions, but the nurse in the retirement home may encounter many
more situations where an average person feels disgust or anger. Similarly,
cashiers of a supermarket chain may all have the same requirements to display
positive emotions to customers, and the number of customers determining the
frequency of emotional requirements may be similar. However, depending on
where a supermarket is located, there may be differing frequencies of encounters
with complaining or otherwise negatively behaving customers, which is a good
predictor of negative emotions of the employee (Doucet, 1998). Consequently,
the number of situations where gaps between felt and desired emotions appear
may differ considerably. The discrepancy between what an average person is
likely to feel and what the respective display rule is, varies from situation to
situation. Therefore, the aspects covered by the concept of emotional dissonance
are not covered by the frequency and other parameters of emotional requirements
because they all refer to the display rules and to more formal characteristics of
social interaction, such as frequency and duration, and not to the quality of the
actual situations and the resulting differing discrepancies between display rules
and average emotions in a given situation.
Two more issues should be mentioned with regard to emotional dissonance.
First, some authors focus on the display of emotions required by the organization,
no matter what a person feels (e.g. Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). Display of
emotion refers to facial expression, bodily behaviour, and voice. These are the
visible aspects of the emotional system (Scherer, 1997; Scherer & Wallbott,
1990). If this is so, could then the display of emotions not be described by
sensorimotor processes? The regulation of sensorimotor processes is, for
example, a part of the action theory approach mentioned previously (Frese &
Zapf, 1994; Hacker, 1998). According to action theory, sensorimotor processes
are highly automatized. They are usually carried out in the automatic mode, that

EMOTION WORK 381

is, without conscious attention. This is also so with respect to the sensorimotor
processes in the expression of emotion (Ekman, 1984; Izard, 1977; Scherer &
Wallbott, 1990). If a certain emotion is felt, then the expression of this emotion
automatically occurs whereby social competence may play a moderator role. If
an emotion that has to be displayed, is not felt, then problems occur. In highly
standardized situations it may be easy to fake. If this is not the case, then the true
feelings may show through and may be recognized by other people (cf. Ekman &
Friesen, 1982 who investigated the differences between true and faked smiling).
In some cases, authenticity, that is not faking, may even be a key variable, for
example, for therapists in encounter therapy (Rogers, 1951). Hochschild (1983)
also raised the problems of surface acting and discussed that even in services

such as airlines deep acting is required. Employees are required to feel the
emotions they should feel because otherwise there is the danger that it would not
work. Findings in social psychology showed that people can sometimes tell when
someone is faking a friendly face (Ekman & Friesen, 1982). Therefore,
emotional dissonance as a job stressor should lead to both surface acting and deep
acting as a reaction, implying that emotion work cannot be reduced to the
sensorimotor regulation of emotional expression. This also shows the difference
between emotional dissonance as a stressor and as a reaction. If deep acting was
successful there is no internal state of emotional dissonance (emotional
dissonance as a reaction or dimension of emotion work). However, deep acting
can be a strategy to deal with the job stressor of emotional dissonance.
Finally, emotional dissonance has to be discussed with reference to the
differentiation of use value and exchange value of work (Hochschild, 1983;
Marx, 1867/1977; Nerdinger, 1994). Hochschild (1983), who coined the term
“emotional labour”, pointed out that “emotional labour is sold for a wage and
therefore has exchange value” (p. 7). Nerdinger discussed in detail that, from the
economic point of view, the work of the service provider is exchanged for
money. However, in many cases the full service requires an interaction as if there
were not an economic but a family-like relation. A therapist is expected to be
truly interested in the client and not just because he or she is paid for it. Similarly,
parents know that child nursing is a job and that the nurses work for money.
Nevertheless they wish that the nurses really love their children. Nerdinger
pointed out that the social interaction is not only a means to deliver the service but
is part of the service product. Thus, a service employee may face contradictory
expectations given by the personal interaction with the client (who, for example,
may want advice) and the economic interests of his or her employer (who may
insist on high sales). Moreover, the requirements of the organization itself may
be ambiguous. A computer hot-liner may be required to be customer friendly,
but, at the same time limit talks with customers to 5 minutes. One can
hypothesize that such contradictory job requirements are a source of emotional
dissonance in any kind of person-related work.

382 ZAPF ET AL.

In sum, applying the concept of action theory to emotion work first leads to
integrating the special control concepts described earlier. Second, it helps to
understand that emotion work is not necessarily negative but has also positive
implications. To explore the construct validity of the instruments developed for
the present studies, we developed several hypotheses.

Hypothesis 1: Emotion work is a multidimensional
construct
Within emotion work, emotional requirements, emotion control, and emotional
dissonance can be distinguished. The differences in these concepts have been

described previously. Empirically, this hypothesis is supported by most findings
in the literature so far with regard to emotional requirements and emotional
dissonance (e.g. Brotheridge & Lee, 1998; Grandey, 1998; Morris & Feldman,
1997). We are not aware of studies that operationalized a concept equivalent to
emotion work control or interaction control. Also, the fact that studies that did
not differentiate between various aspects of emotion work did not find the
expected results (Adelmann, 1995), supports the view that emotion work is not a
homogeneous construct.

Hypothesis 2(a): Emotional requirement scales are positively
correlated
It is expected that the various aspects of emotional requirements are highly
correlated, whereas emotional requirements and emotional dissonance should
show a positive but lower correlation. The reason is that all emotional
requirements are a function of the interaction time with clients and the existence
of display rules. In contrast to Morris and Feldman (1996), most of the items of
the present study have a frequency component. The more interactions a person
has with a client, the more this person is supposed to show positive and negative
emotions. In addition, the sensitivity requirements should also be high.
Sensitivity requirements should be positively correlated with the other scales
because the expression of emotion should in most cases be dependent on the
emotions of the interaction partner,which have to be adequately perceived.

Hypothesis 2(b): Emotional requirement scales are also
positively correlated with emotional dissonance
The frequency of emotional dissonance also depends on the frequency of
interactions. Therefore, emotional dissonance should be positively correlated
with the emotional requirement scales. However, because emotional dissonance
is also a function of how pleasant or unpleasant the social interactions are, the
correlations are expected to be lower than the correlations amongst the emotional
requirement scales, which all mainly depend on the interaction frequency. In

EMOTION WORK 383

addition, Morris and Feldman (1996) proposed that the higher the frequency of
emotion display, the higher is the chance that emotions have to be displayed that
do not fit the emotions felt. A similar argument applies for the variety of
emotions. For variety of emotions it can be added that it is more likely that
employees have problems with negative emotions compared to positive
emotions. With regard to the correlation between emotional requirement
variables and emotional dissonance, the empirical findings are mixed. Grandey
(1998) found a correlation between suppressing negative emotions and
emotional dissonance, but not between expressing positive emotions and
emotional dissonance. Also, Brotheridge and Lee (1998) found a correlation
between frequency of emotion display and emotional dissonance.

Hypothesis 2(c): Emotion control is negatively related with
emotional dissonance
There is evidence in the stress literature that control is negatively related to job
stressors. Abraham (1998) was able to demonstrate such a relationship for job
autonomy and emotional dissonance. This negative relation should also occur for
specific control measures such as emotion work control and interaction control,
especially if the specific control variables match the specific kinds of stressors,
which should be the case in the present study.

Hypothesis 3: There are both positive and negative
relations between emotional requirements and strain
and well-being
Much of the literature addressed the negative effects of emotion work (e.g
Adelmann, 1995; Hochschild, 1983). Most often scholars cited the negative
relations with burnout, hypothesizing that emotion work would increase
emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and would reduce personal
accomplishment. Some authors discussed relationships with poor self-esteem
and depression. Hochschild, in particular, referred to the problem of alienation
from one’s true feelings. A few authors, however, also referred to potential
positive effects such as job satisfaction, self-esteem, and self-efficacy (e.g.
Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Morris & Feldman, 1997; Stenross & Kleinman,
1989; Tolich, 1993; Wharton, 1993).
Drawing parallels with action theory-based concepts of work characteristics
(Frese & Zapf, 1994; Hacker, 1998), it can be assumed that work in general is not
either positive or negative. Rather, a challenging job may comprise positive job
content variables such as job control, complexity, or variety at work, but
challenging jobs often go along with high quantitative workload and uncertainty
at work. Similarly, it is not assumed that emotion work is generally either
negative or positive. On the one hand, emotion work is laborious and effortful.
Therefore, if a high frequency of emotional display and a variety of emotions are

384 ZAPF ET AL.

required this should lead to psychological strain, especially to emotional
exhaustion (Morris & Feldman, 1996). When emotional requirements exceed
certain limits the likelihood increases that the emotions that have to be expressed
do not match the emotions that are felt at that moment. That is, in line with the
person–environment fit model (e.g. Edwards & van Harrison, 1993), if emotional
requirements are frequent and last for a long time, their effects on well-being
should be negative. This assumption is supported by findings in the burnout
literature. Maslach (1982) stated that frequent, intense, and charging face-to-face
interactions were associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion. Cordes
and Dougherty (1993) in their review reported that longer interactions with
clients were associated with higher levels of burnout. Morris and Feldman (1997)

considered emotional exhaustion as the key consequence of emotion work.
Reviewing the empirical literature, however, shows that the expected correla-
tions between emotional requirements and emotional exhaustion were often not
(Adelmann, 1995; Morris & Feldman, 1997) or only occasionally found
(Brotheridge & Lee, 1998; Grandey, 1998). For Morris and Feldman, this may be
due to the fact that they did not directly refer to the frequency or duration of
emotional display but to the underlying social interaction. Although empirical
findings are mixed here, it is assumed that variables representing emotional
requirements are positively correlated with emotional exhaustion and other
variables of psychological strain.
Based on the literature on the affiliation motive it can be assumed that dealing
with other people and expressing emotions when interacting with these people
satisfies affiliation, status, and recognition needs, for example, by showing
altruistic behaviour (e.g. Bierhoff, 1990; Hill, 1987). In many cases, the
expression of emotion can be thought of as a spontaneous process experienced
not to be effortful at all (cf. Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Scherer & Wallbott,
1990), but contributing to a social situation with positive consequences for the
employee concerned. The intentional expression of positive emotions usually
increases the probability of the interaction partner to show reciprocal positive
emotions in return (Wiemann & Giles, 1997). This can be perceived as positive
feedback contributing to the employee’s satisfaction and self-esteem. Adelmann
(1995) referred to the facial feedback hypothesis to argue for positive effects of
emotion work. There is at least some evidence for the weak form of this
hypothesis: In an experiment, Strack, Stepper, and Martin (1988) showed that
participants whose muscle groups necessary for laughing were stimulated found
a movie more funny in comparison to a group whose laughing muscles were
inhibited.
There is, indeed, some evidence of the positive implications of emotion work.
On a qualitative level, Tolich (1993) described supermarket clerks who enjoyed
showing prescribed emotions in the form of jokes or entertainment of customers
who chose their checkout lines. Stenross and Kleinman (1989) reported that
detectives positively assessed interrogations with criminal suspects because this

EMOTION WORK 385

played a central role for goal achievement, namely, solving a case. Wharton
(1993) found a positive relation with job satisfaction and Grandey (1998)
reported a positive correlation between expressing positive emotions and job
satisfaction. Based on these considerations and empirical findings it was
expected that emotional requirement variables are positively correlated with
personal accomplishment, self-esteem, and job satisfaction.

Hypothesis 4: Emotion work control and
interaction control have a positive effect on health
Emotion work-related control is conceptualized as a special case of job

control concerning the possibility to decide whether or not one likes to express
emotions in a certain situation. In many studies on job stress (e.g. Kahn &
Byiosiere, 1992) it has been shown that job control is typically positively related
to well-being. Therefore, it can be expected that this is also true for the special
cases of emotion work control and interaction control. There is no direct
empirical evidence so far. However, on a qualitative level, it has been shown that
the exertion of control in social interactions was perceived to be positive and that
employees struggled for control in interactions with clients (Rafaeli, 1989;
Tolich, 1993).

Hypothesis 5: Emotional dissonance is negatively
related with health
Hochschild (1983) was the first who described the negative effects when positive
emotions have to be displayed when either nothing is felt or if the felt emotions
are even in contrast to the displayed emotions. Hochschild asserted that if
employees do not feel what they ought to feel, they may blame themselves and
feel phony and hypocritical. This may result in low self-esteem (Kruml &
Geddes, 1998). In such cases, they may also start to blame the company, which is
likely to go along with decreased job satisfaction. Rafaeli and Sutton (1987)
argued that emotional dissonance is a form of person–role conflict (Kahn et al.,
1964), which means that one has to do things that are against one’s better
judgement. Because role conflict is a strong predictor of emotional exhaustion
(cf. the meta-analysis of Lee & Ashforth, 1996), it was hypothesized that
emotional dissonance is also a strong predictor of exhaustion. All in all, the
clearest empirical relation between emotion work variables and psychological
strain occurred for emotional dissonance and emotional exhaustion (Abraham,
1998; Brotheridge & Lee, 1998; Grandey, 1998; Morris & Feldman, 1997) and
depersonalization (Grandey, 1998). Mostly, no relationship was found for
relations with personal accomplishment (Grandey, 1998). Empirical evidence on
the relation between emotional dissonance and job satisfaction is mixed. Morris
and Feldman found a negative relation between emotional dissonance and job
satisfaction, whereas Grandey (1998) did not.

Emotion work as a source of stress: The concept and the development of an instrument.

Emotion work as a source of stress: The concept and the development of an instrument.

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