Emotional labor and occupational well-being : a latent profile analytic approach

In the last three decades, emotional labor has been conceptualized as comprising three strategies, namely, surface acting, deep acting, and expression of naturally felt emotion. Research suggested that each emotional labor strategy relates differently to various health and job outcomes, such as burnout and job satisfaction. These findings and the conclusions drawn are predicated on compartmentalized treatment of the three strategies. A fundamental yet unresolved question concerns whether employees adopt more than one type of emotional labor in the workplace. In this study, we adopted latent profile analysis (LPA) to examine the behavioral profile (i.e., class) of employees' deployment of emotional labor strategies and how these profiles relate to job satisfaction and burnout. Three latent classes were identified, and the results showed that employees with these different profiles reported significantly different levels of job satisfaction and burnout. These results provide support to a person-centered approach to understand the outcomes of performing emotional labor.