ABSTRACT
As reported in Chapters 3 and 4, I used the concept of emotional labor to predict the differential impact of emotional intelligence (EI) on different types of jobs. I mentioned that there are two alternative conceptualizations of emotional labor. Traditionally, it has been studied as coping strategies that job incumbents adopt in order to perform emotionally demanding duties. Deep acting refers to the incumbents actually having the emotion appropriate for the situation, while surface acting means the incumbents only pretend to have the emotion. The major fi nding according to this conceptualization in the literature is that incumbents who frequently use surface acting to cope with their job duties will have a higher chance of emotional exhaustion, which is a critical component of burnout. The reason is that although surface acting may help the job incumbents to perform their job duties, they would experience dissonance between their true and expressed emotions.
