SOCIAL CHALLENGES IRISH YOUTH

Social Challenges Irish Youth

Social Challenges Irish Youth

Introduction

Over the past few years, the phenomenon of emotional labour has received considerable attention due to its relevance for health care workers. One of the core job activities for health care workers is the social interaction with patients or clients, in which the requirement to regulate emotions plays a key role. In health care, emotional labour has been an important topic of debate because of its importance for both providers and recipients of care (Hunter and Smith, 2007). Mitchell and Smith (2003), for instance, indicated that emotional labour has always been part of the image of health care workers.

Emotional labour has usually been conceptualized in two main ways (Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002). First, employee-focused emotional labour denotes the employees' efforts to manage their own emotions. Corresponding measures tap respondents' efforts at 'surface acting' and 'deep acting' (e.g. [Brotheridge and Lee, 2002] and [Kruml and Geddes, 2000]). Second, job-focused emotional labour denotes the level of emotional job demands in occupations. This has usually been measured as job demands such as frequency of interactions with clients or dealing with death and dying (e.g. [Morris and Feldman, 1996], [Pugliesi, 1999] and [Zapf and Holz, 2006]). Grandey (2000) provided a conceptual model of emotional labour that integrates both conceptualizations. According to her view, job-focused emotional labour refers to situational characteristics of the work situation (e.g. job demands) that cause employees to engage in employee-focused emotional labour. Emotional labour field studies and emotion regulation lab studies have demonstrated that the effortful processes of surface acting and deep acting are related to employee stress-reactions as well as their well-being [Grandey, 2000] and [Zapf, 2002].

In this article the construct of emotional labour refers exclusively to emotional demands at work (i.e. job-focused emotional labour). It is well known from the job stress literature that emotional job demands contribute to stress-reactions such as burnout and psychosomatic health symptoms (e.g. [Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002], [Le Blanc et al., 2000] and [Zapf et al., 2001]). The basic proposition here is that health care workers in emotionally demanding jobs report higher levels of burnout or other health problems than workers in less emotionally demanding jobs. The specific underlying mechanism of this relation is still part of the 'black box' of emotional labour. Brotheridge and Lee (2002) noted that there has been no overarching theoretical framework that can be used to explain the relation between emotional job demands and adverse health outcomes. Accordingly, the present study contributes to the literature by examining this relation using job stress theories developed by different scholars (e.g. [Hobfoll, 1989], [Hobfoll, 2002], [de Jonge and Dormann, 2003] and [de Jonge and Dormann, 2006]). By doing so, our findings not only shed light on the working of the relation between emotional job demands and health and well-being, but also have implications for ways of managing emotional job demands in health care work.

As said before, there is ample empirical evidence that emotional job demands can be stressful (for an overview, see ...