Use of Emotional Labor in Day-to-Day Interactions with Managers and Colleagues

The emotional work has begun to be increasingly studied given some important organizational and personal outcomes such as lower job satisfaction, burnout or emotional exhaustion. In the literature, the construct is connected mainly with client interaction and rarely with leadership or group collaboration. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the degree to which emotional work is done toward managers and colleagues. The conclusions are based on a survey conducted among employees from different enterprises regarding their experience with managing emotions in the workplace. First, they weighed the extent to which they used emotional work in relation to managers and colleagues, rating some items from the Emotional Labor Scale (ELS) developed by Brotheridge and Lee (2003). The statements were adapted to describe the regulatory processes of surface and deep acting employed by workers in front of their manager and colleagues. The respondents also evaluated themselves on some characteristics such as optimism, self-esteem, charisma, spontaneity, energy, enthusiasm, extraversion. The results of the survey suggest that Romanian employees don?t rely too much on surface and deep acting. In general, they show their true emotions to managers and colleagues. The degree to which the employees use the emotional work in relation to managers and colleagues proved to be correlated with some personal characteristics such as optimism, enthusiasm, trustworthiness, self-esteem, spontaneity and age. The manifestation of true emotions in front of colleagues is positively associated with extraversion and negatively associated with age.