Emotion Labor and well-being: An overview of results obtained in various Italian samples performing different service jobs.

A person's job is the source of a variety of emotion-related processes and outcomes, including the intensity and frequency with which pleasant emotions (e.g., pride, joy, calm) or negatives ones (e.g., anger, shame) are experienced, emotional exhaustion, or a sense of working realization or job involvement the person experiences. Such emotion-related processes might be hypothesized to constitute important parameters in defining life quality, at both the individual and the social level. In particular, emotion regulation processes are a crucial aspect of the working role in many so-called service jobs that imply employee-customer interactions: what kind of regulation processes are activated, with what frequency, and what are their antecedents and their consequences are important aspects to consider because of their potential implications for the well-being of individuals. To address these issues (e.g., to explain the likelyhood that a worker will engage in emotional regulation, and with what consequences) a set of studies was carried out with Italian workers performing service jobs in different sectors (e.g., banks, hospitals, public offices). Both job-related variables (e.g. frequency and duration of interactions employees engage in with clients/customers, job position, working experience), and individual psychological and sociodemographic variables (e.g. level of job involvement, felt burnout; gender, marital status, age), were taken into account. The results - obtained from a "macro" level analysis of the data collected in the various studies - confirmed the hypotheses that: emotion regulation processes do occur in service jobs; embedded in a net of relationships with several job and individual variables, emotion regulation can imply high psychological costs for service workers --e.g., 'shallow' regulation processes (e.g., regulatiing facial expression of emotion, as opposed to a 'deeper' but more difficult-to-activate, more energy-taxing regulation process) have a personal cost, indexed by working dissatisfaction, demotivation, and emotional exhaustion; burned-out workers, in turn, entertain interactions with clients that are frustrating, ineffective, or even harmful.