ABSTRACT
Early years of research concerning emotional labor were dominated by a focus on the role of the employee who is required to perform emotional labor (e.g., Hochschild, 1983). More recent dyadic models (e.g., Côté, 2005), discussed in the previous chapter (Côté, Van Kleef, & Sy, 2013), also recognize the role played by the person towards whom the emotional labor is directed. In this chapter, we seek to further expand the understanding of who is involved in and affected by emotional labor, by broadening our focus to the unit (i.e., the collective or group), within which emotional labor occurs. Within organizational contexts, employees and their managers typically form units within which they work, and we argue that it is important to consider emotional labor from a unit-level perspective. To do this, we begin by outlining the traditional understanding of emotional labor, then go on to explain how this understanding might be extended in light of recent avenues of organizational, psychological, and sociological research and theory. In our Framework for Unit-level Emotional Labor (FUEL), we consider the roles played by individuals within a unit and the unit as a whole. By broadening our focus to the unit, we explain how the emotions, attitudes, and behaviors of whole units of people can become affected by emotional labor, and discuss the methods necessary for investigating these effects.
