ABSTRACT
In her seminal work on emotional labor, Hochschild (1983) described how airline stewardesses at Delta Airlines needed to have the right “Delta personality” (p. 98) to generate convincing emotional displays, which consisted of qualities like emotional stability, interpersonal warmth, and a collective orientation. Nearly 30 years later, many researchers are still focused on identifying the individual differences that are predictive of success in the emotional labor process (e.g., Grandey, 2000). This focus involves adopting a between–person perspective on emotional labor, in contrast to the within–person research described by Beal and Trougakos (2013, Chapter 2). Rather than attempting to explain variability in emotional labor within–persons and over time, our focus in this chapter is on understanding the variability in emotional labor that is observed between different people based on their stable characteristics. Accordingly, this chapter approaches emotional labor in terms of the third lens described by Grandey, Diefendorff, and Rupp (2013, Chapter 1); our focus is on emotional labor as an intrapsychic process, and we seek to explain between–person variability in the use of different strategies, invested effort to perform emotional labor, and the self-regulatory outcomes experienced from emotional labor.
