Relationship between Emotional Labor and Job Satisfaction: Case of Tourism Sector

Today, with the increase of competition and the impact of changing human needs with globalization, the importance of the service sector has increased. Businesses in the service sector expect more efforts from their employees to achieve sustainable competitive advantage and differentiate from other competitors. Due to its nature, the service sector requires a high level of communication and interaction with customers. While interacting with their customers, employees strive to reflect the emotions that their customers or managers expect from them in the best way and to show emotional labor. The fact that employees have to act in accordance with the rules of demonstration determined by the organization increases customer satisfaction on the one hand, and negatively affects the employees due to the emotional mismatches that may occur and reduces job satisfaction and performance. The aim of this study is to reveal the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction in the tourism sector, where intensive work environment is required and one to one relationship with customers, with the help of regression analysis. As a result of the analysis, emotional labor affects 49.9% of job satisfaction positively.