ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the providers' experience of psychological burnout. It is concerned with the understanding of burnout to include a consideration of emotional labor. The chapter examines what is unique about caring labor is the fact that the organization does not seek to control the emotional labor of its employees, but the organization in fact prevents the provider from performing the kinds of emotional labor the provider feels is needed by the client. It reviews the literature on burnout, and then provides a more thorough discussion of emotional labor, emphasizing the importance of emotional labor to the experience of burnout. Emotional labor is associated with service work, namely, work that involves interactions with clients and entails the management of feeling and the expression of appropriate emotions. Blake E. Ashforth and Ronald H. Humphrey extend Arlie Russell Hochschild's original formulation to consider the various ways in which role identity moderates some of the negative effects of emotional labor.
