Rebecca J. Erickson

Emotional labor, burnout, and inauthenticity : Does gender matter?

A number of researchers have examined the conditions under which individuals perform emotional labor and the effects of such labor on psychological well-being. Much of this research has been limited to the experiences of service-sector workers in highly gender-segregated jobs. Prior survey research also tended to focus on dimensions of interactive work rather than on the actual management of feeling that is the foundation of the emotional labor process. Addressing each of these issues, we examine the experience and management of positive, negative, and agitated emotions Building on prior theory and research, we argue that the management of agitation is the form of emotional labor most likely to be associated with increased feelings of burnout and inauthenticity, and that this negative effect on well-being should be more common among women. We find that managing feelings of agitation increases burnout and inauthenticity and that inauthenticity is most pronounced among those experiencing the highest levels of agitation. These effects do not differ by gender, however.

Social selves : theories of the social formation of personality

Society and the Individual PART ONE: PERSONALITY AS SOCIAL DISCOURSE Language and the Social Self The Self in Everyday Communication Power, Knowledge and the Self PART TWO: PERSONALITY IN SOCIAL RELATIONS AND INTERDEPENDENCIES Social Relations and Personality Social Relations, Culture and the Self Power Relations, Interdependencies and the Civilized Personality Conclusion The Formation and Reconstruction of Social Selves

Emotional display rules as work unit norms: a multilevel analysis of emotional labor among nurses.

Emotional labor theory has conceptualized emotional display rules as shared norms governing the expression of emotions at work. Using a sample of registered nurses working in different units of a hospital system, we provided the first empirical evidence that display rules can be represented as shared, unit-level beliefs. Additionally, controlling for the influence of dispositional affectivity, individual-level display rule perceptions, and emotion regulation, we found that unit-level display rules are associated with individual-level job satisfaction. We also showed that unit-level display rules relate to burnout indirectly through individual-level display rule perceptions and emotion regulation strategies. Finally, unit-level display rules also interacted with individual-level dispositional affectivity to predict employee use of emotion regulation strategies. We discuss how future research on emotional labor and display rules, particularly in the health care setting, can build on these findings.

Doing for Others on the Job: The Affective Requirements of Service Work, Gender, and Emotional Well-Being

American workers face an economy that has shifted from the industrial production of goods to the postindustrial production of services. For many, job success depends on ones ability to produce speech, action, and emotion that symbolize a willingness to “do for” the customer or client. Such expectations comprise the affective requirements of todays service-sector jobs. Using a sample of employees within the health and banking industries, we examine the effects of affective requirements, interactive work, and other occupational conditions on womens and mens job-related emotional well-being. We find that when ones job success depends on being able to handle people well, both women and men tend to experience higher levels of inauthenticity and fewer positive feelings about their work. However, spending more time at work interacting with others and having greater control over that work tends to have the opposite effect on well-being. We also find that job involvement operates quite differently for women and men in ways that are sensitive to service-sector work conditions.

The relations of daily task accomplishment satisfaction with changes in affect: a multilevel study in nurses.

Focusing on a sample of nurses, this investigation examined the relationships of daily task accomplishment satisfaction (for direct and indirect care tasks) with changes in positive and negative affect from preshift to postshift. Not accomplishing tasks to ones satisfaction was conceptualized as a daily workplace stressor that should increase daily negative affect and decrease daily positive affect from preshift to postshift. Further, because of the greater centrality of direct care nursing tasks to nursing work role identities (relative to indirect care tasks), we expected that task accomplishment satisfaction (or lack thereof) for these tasks would have stronger effects on changes in affect than would task accomplishment satisfaction for indirect care tasks. We also examined 2 person-level resources, collegial nurse-physician relations and psychological resilience, as moderators of the relationships among these daily variables, with the expectation that these resources would buffer the harmful effects of low task accomplishment satisfaction on nurse affect. Results supported almost all of the proposed effects, though the cross-level interactions were observed only for the effects of indirect care task accomplishment satisfaction on affect and not for direct care task accomplishment satisfaction on affect.

The Effect of Manager Exclusion on Nurse Turnover Intention and Care Quality

Little is known about how exclusionary practices (i.e., ignored, ostracized) by managers differ across demographics and influence nursing outcomes. This study examines whether managerial exclusion varies by generation, race, and gender, and the extent to which these variables, in turn, relate to turnover intention and perceived patient care among a sample of 747 nurses working in hospitals in a midwestern health system. Exclusion did not differ across most demographic groups, though men reported less exclusion than women. Younger nurses of the Millennial generation, those feeling excluded, and those with fewer years of experience reported lower quality patient care. Managerial exclusion, being a nurse of color, and less experience were associated with stronger intentions to leave. Nursing leaders should attend to factors that may contribute to racial minorities seeking other jobs, diminish younger nurses’ ability to provide high-quality care, and minimize practices that might lead nurses to feel excluded.

Families and Emotions

As attention to the emotional dimensions of social structure, culture, and individual development has grown, scholars have renewed their interest in the emotional lives of family members. The current chapter examines three key areas of interdisciplinary research on emotion within families. It first explores how biological predispositions are activated and shaped through processes of emotional socialization within families. The chapter then examines the gendered performance of emotion work, demonstrating how family-related emotion management connects embodied experience with the maintenance of social systems over time. And finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of how emotional capital links emotion in families with members’ experiences in other institutions. Given that families are charged with passing on emotion knowledge, skills, and capacities to the next generation, the chapter highlights the ways that families are critical for understanding how emotions contribute to the reproduction of inequalities as well as having the potential to mobilize transformational social practice.

“I Can Never Be Too Comfortable”: Race, Gender, and Emotion at the Hospital Bedside:

In this article, we examine how race and gender shape nurses’ emotion practice. Based on audio diaries collected from 48 nurses within two Midwestern hospital systems in the United States, we illustrate the disproportionate emotional labor that emerges among women nurses of color in the white institutional space of American health care. In this environment, women of color experience an emotional double shift as a result of negotiating patient, coworker, and supervisor interactions. In confronting racist encounters, nurses of color in our sample experience additional job-related stress, must perform disproportionate amounts of emotional labor, and experience depleted emotional resources that negatively influence patient care. Methodologically, the study extends prior research by using audio diaries collected from a racially diverse sample to capture emotion as a situationally emergent and complex feature of nursing practice. We also extend research on nursing by tracing both the sources and consequences of unequal emotion practices for nurse well-being and patient care.

Where the Ritual Is: Examinations of a Microfoundational Mo(ve)ment

Randall Collins has thrown down the gauntlet to everyone seeking to understand contemporary social life. The challenge? After reading this book, try to examine the social world, theorize social order, or advocate for social change without appreciating the influence and effect of interaction rituals. I expect that you won’t be able to do it. The extent to which each reader views this outcome (and thus the book) as useful is likely to depend on, and be assessed by, the same types of questions that Collins might use to evaluate the relative success of any interaction ritual (i.e., questions concerning group solidarity and individual emotional energy, the creation of symbols that represent group membership, and moral righteousness in defending these symbols). In the case of Interaction Ritual Chains, one might ask: To what extent does Collins’s argument remind you of key ideas introduced by professors in graduate school, debates that have raged in past or present classrooms, or current discussions taking place within your intellectual network or area of specialization? Moreover, to what extent does the book energize your own sociological imagination? Does it cultivate an increased sense of confidence about particular ideas, encourage the pursuit of specific techniques of thinking, or increase your sense of urgency about the need to develop a rival approach? Next, how frequently do you find yourself mentioning this book to others, suggesting that others should read it, or considering how you might use it in the classroom? Finally, in discussing this book with others, how vehemently do you defend your interpretation of the work? From the perspective of interaction ritual (IR) theory, books and other material objects have the potential to circulate as symbolic representations of group membership, reminding us of interactions that mobilized feelings of solidarity and through which we seek the rejuvenation of such social sentiments. And you thought those book exhibits were all about capitalism .|.|. The ideas presented in this book will not surprise any sociologist familiar with Collins’s work. Interaction Ritual Chains represents the culmination of more than three decades spent carefully analyzing the microfoundations of sociology and in the meticulous development of a full-fledged “radical microsociology.” In the first half of the book, Collins details the facets of this microsociological approach and demonstrates how IR theory emerges from a unique blending of Durkheim’s and Goffman’s ritual analysis with Weberian conflict theory and Meadian symbolic interactionism. Collins also engages briefly with the work of Pierre Bourdieu as he microtranslates a number of macrosociological concepts (e.g., class, status, and power). In so doing, Collins extends the theoretical and empirical use-value of cultural capital, social capital, and their interconvertibility with economic capital while criticizing Bourdieu’s development of a static theory of reproduction rather than a dynamic theory of social transformation. Given Collins’s view that “[c]reativity occurs in a situation of rivalry” (p. 194), the power of IR theory to transform the way sociologists theorize social reproduction and change might be increased were he to actively foster the sort of theoretical rivalry that he merely hints at here (also see Collins 1998; 2000).