Emotional Labour and Burnout: Some Methodological Considerations and Refinements

Our aim was to improve understanding of the relationship between emotional labour and health outcomes by developing an exploratory fine-grained scale based on previous research. With this measurement, we wished to clearly distinguish re-evaluation and attentional deployment (i.e., the 2 aspects defined as deep acting); amplification and suppression (i.e., the 2 emotion regulation directions of surface acting) and emotional dissonance. This scale was completed by 688 health care professionals and social workers along with the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Exploratory factor analyses were performed to assess the adequacy of a 5-factor solution. Links between emotional labour scores and burnout were investigated. The results contribute to the emotional labour literature in several ways. First, they provide further evidence of the negative health outcomes associated with emotional dissonance. Second, the study indicates that current measures of surface acting used in previous research can capture different processes, with suppression positively related to burnout and amplification negatively related to burnout. Third, cognitive change and attentional deployment, currently measured as composing a unidimensional factor, have different impacts on employee health outcomes: Cognitive change is associated with low levels of burnout while attentional deployment is positively related to burnout.