Open research questions in Emotional Labor in Professions

What the literature leaves open

• These collective practices emerge where organizational mechanisms for safety, protection, and accountability are insufficient.

  From Individual Coping to Collective Care Crafting: Reframing Job Crafting in Sexualized Workplaces · 2026 · DOI

• The author finds that worker-customer relations resembling SSIs are already reported in some studies, though it remains unclear whether these SSIs are recurrent enough to qualify as work-games and how much they contribute to resistance.

  Are There Service Work-Games of Resistance? “Work-Play” and Relational Resistance in Dance Club Waitstaff Work · 2026 · DOI

• Teacher care remains underexplored in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) higher education contexts.

  Between Emotional Labor and Professional Identity: How EFL Teachers Enact Care in Turkish Higher Education · 2026 · DOI

• However, the factors that protect against these outcomes are not well understood.

  Reducing the risk of burnout in human service professions: identifying practical strategies to manage emotional demands: A mixed-methods study in Denmark · 2025 · DOI

• Background The happy family meal ideology is widespread, but few studies have specifically investigated the way emotions are managed at the table.

  Mealtime emotion work: Gendered politics of care and power at the table · 2024 · DOI

• CONCLUSIONS: The research area is still in its early stages and the findings are mostly consistent, but the small number of studies needs to be replicated to increase the reliability of the results.

  Emotional labor as emotion regulation investigated with ecological momentary assessment – a scoping review · 2024 · DOI

• The study only examined the experiences of migrant domiciliary care workers in London. The study did not explore the experiences of other stakeholders in the social care sector. The lack of software designed specifically for IPA analysis was a challenge.

  Emotional Intelligence, Trust, Dignity, Psychological Contract, and Staff Performance: An Exploratory Evaluation of UK’s Migrant Domiciliary Care Workers Lived Experience · 2026 · DOI

• The lack of understanding of the relationships between managerial emotional intelligence, psychological contract, and care quality. The lack of research on the lived experiences of migrant domiciliary care workers. The need to examine the psychological contract breaches in the social care sector.

  Emotional Intelligence, Trust, Dignity, Psychological Contract, and Staff Performance: An Exploratory Evaluation of UK’s Migrant Domiciliary Care Workers Lived Experience · 2026 · DOI

• There is a lack of comparative research on skin care professionals in Korea and China. The study aims to address this gap by investigating the differences in emotional intelligence, job stress, self-efficacy, and job involvement.

  A Comparative Study on Emotional Intelligence and Self-Efficacy of Korean and Chinese Skin Care Professionals: Differences in Job Stress and Job Commitment · 2026 · DOI

• The use of business students as proxies for frontline employees introduces limitations on ecological validity. Students may lack the professional socialization and accumulated service experience that shape how actual employees interpret and respond to customer emotional cues.

  How employees respond to customer anger and sadness: emotional reciprocity and recovery strategies in service failures · 2026 · DOI

• Further studies can investigate the long-term effects of customer emotional expressions on frontline employees. The development of strategies to mitigate customers' negative emotions can be informed by the study's results.

  How employees respond to customer anger and sadness: emotional reciprocity and recovery strategies in service failures · 2026 · DOI

• The high turnover rate of medical workers is a global problem. There is a need to explore the relationship between the presence of meaning in life and turnover intention among medical workers.

  The relationship between medical workers’ presence of meaning in life and turnover intention: the mediating role of searching for meaning in life and professional happiness · 2026 · DOI

• There are still some limitations of this study. First, this study used a cross- sectional design with single‑source self‑reported data, which may carry common method variance. Although Harman’s single-factor test showed the first factor accounted for only 34.71% of variance, indicating no severe CMV concern, Harman’s test alone is a relatively weak diagnostic for ARTICLE IN PRESS ARTICLE IN PRESS ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT common method bias. Future studies are encouraged to adopt more rigorous approaches such as marker variables or temporal separation to further control for CMV. Second, this study adopted whole-cluster random sampling to select a partial sample from Hunan Province, China, which may not be representative of all medical workers in mainland China, thus limiting the generalizability of the findings. Future multi-center studies should be conducted to address this limitation. In this study, the Turnover Intention Scale used was reduced to two items from three after PLS-SEM analysis, with a Cronbach’s α value of 0.65. Although this value meets the acceptable threshold for reliability, it also suggests room for improvement in the scale’s internal consistency. This scale is widely accepted by researchers as an authoritative measure of the strength of turnover intention among Chinese medical workers. It is selected due to its feasibility for data collection and the consideration of reducing the participation time of participants. However, we acknowledge that the limited number of items may restrict the scale’s ability to capture the multidimensional characteristics of TI. We recommend that future studies employ more comprehensive and widely used turnover intention scales to improve measurement precision and enable replicable results. Further research can be carried out in the following areas in the future. First, as most studies currently use cross-sectional surveys, longitudinal studies can be conducted in the future to track changes in medical workers’ turnover intention over different periods and to explore the dynamic ARTICLE IN PRESS ARTICLE IN PRESS ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT trajectories between different variables. Second, medical workers’ sense of meaning in life and professional happiness may be affected by cultural contexts, and future studies can be conducted in different countries to explore the impact and the model applicability in different cultural contexts. Third, qualitative interview studies can be continued on the original basis to more comprehensively understand the intrinsic correlation mechanisms and influence paths among different variables. Finally, in addition to the several variables currently studied, the influence of other potential variables, such as job satisfaction, organizational atmosphere, etc., on turnover intention can be explored, so as to improve the model.

  The relationship between medical workers’ presence of meaning in life and turnover intention: the mediating role of searching for meaning in life and professional happiness · 2026 · DOI

• Managing emotional labour is a challenge for educators. The socio-political constructions of professionalism as rational not emotional pose a challenge. The lack of recognition of emotional labour as a core component of professional practice is a challenge.

  “My Emotions Do Matter”: Illuminating the Wellbeing Impact of Early Childhood Educators’ Emotional Labour in their Work With Families · 2026 · DOI

• The unclear understanding of emotional labour in educators' work with families. The lack of research on the wellbeing impacts of emotional labour on educators.

  “My Emotions Do Matter”: Illuminating the Wellbeing Impact of Early Childhood Educators’ Emotional Labour in their Work With Families · 2026 · DOI

• The study identifies a gap in the understanding of the distinct pathways of empathy and compassion in response to suffering. Prior research has not fully explored the effects of empathy and compassion on well-being in police officers.

  Empathy for Suffering, Compassion, and Emotional Distancing in Police Work: A Longitudinal Cross-Lagged Study on Dual Pathways to Well-Being · 2026 · DOI

• While our findings offer important insights, several limitations should be acknowledged. First, despite employing a longitudinal design and uncovering the simultaneous effects of exposure on compassion and empathy for suffering, the two-wave structure captures only between-person effects, thereby limiting conclusions about intra-individual dynamics (Hamaker et al., 2015). A random intercept cross-lagged panel model, which requires at least three waves of data, would be necessary to distinguish between- and within-person effects more clearly. In doing this, future research could test both pathways within a model. Second, attrition bias (Goodman & Blum, 1996) may have influenced our findings, as significant differences emerged between completers and dropouts. However, we applied full-information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation with time pressure as an auxiliary variable to minimize estimation bias (Collins et al., 2001; Enders, 2022), and comparisons between the full sample and completers revealed no substantial differences, suggesting limited evidence for serious attrition bias. Nevertheless, future studies should adopt strategies to further reduce attrition, such as personalized reminders or incentives where feasible. Third, our sample consisted exclusively of German police officers, which raises questions about generalizability of the findings. Future research should seek to replicate these results in different cultural contexts and among other human service professionals, such as caregivers, pastoral workers or physicians. Finally, the use of self-report measures introduces the potential risk of a common method bias (Podsakoff et al., 2003). While steps such as anonymous participation and the use of autoregressive models help mitigate this risk (Dwyer, 1983; Zapf et al., 1996), future studies would benefit from including objective indicators—such as neurophysiological measures (e.g., Dor-Ziderman et al., 2021)—to strengthen the validity of causal interpretations.

  Empathy for Suffering, Compassion, and Emotional Distancing in Police Work: A Longitudinal Cross-Lagged Study on Dual Pathways to Well-Being · 2026 · DOI

• Existing frameworks have not clearly specified how clinicians regulate engagement in high-demand perioperative settings. The emotional labor tradition has not provided an account of how emotional engagement should be regulated under conditions of high demand.

  Calibrated Emotional Engagement in Perioperative Care: A Middle‐Range Theory for Sustainable Clinical Practice · 2026 · DOI

• Integrated prevention approaches addressing underlying psychological mechanisms remain insufficiently developed. There is a lack of integrative approaches considering psychological, social, and behavioral mechanisms.

  COGNITIVE, EMOTIONAL, AND BEHAVIORAL PREVENTION OF PROFESSIONAL BURNOUT AMONG LAWYERS: AN EMPIRICALLY GROUNDED APPROACH · 2026 · DOI

• The study is limited to a single Malaysian private university. The sample size is small, with only eleven faculty members interviewed. The study acknowledges the potential for interpretive bias due to the researcher’s insider status.

  “I have to split myself”: emotional labour and cleft habitus among dental academics in Malaysia · 2026 · DOI

• The study identifies a gap in the literature on emotional labour in academic settings, particularly in private and low-resource institutions. The research highlights the need for a sociological perspective on emotional labour in academic work.

  “I have to split myself”: emotional labour and cleft habitus among dental academics in Malaysia · 2026 · DOI

• The HR profession is characterized by a dualism between rational and emotional dimensions, which is not adequately addressed in current HR practice. There is a lack of integration between instrumental rationality and emotional competence in HR.

  The Babylonian Nature of HR: Critical Remarks on the HR Role · 2026 · DOI

• The study addresses a gap in resilience research by distinguishing between transient and enduring forms of happiness. The study explores how toxic organizational climates shape the effectiveness of happiness in the high-demand Indian IT sector.

  Happiness at Work: A Shield Against Toxicity · 2026 · DOI

• Focusing on India’s high-demand and globally significant IT sector also adds value by addressing a context that has been relatively underexplored in resilience research, thereby enhancing the cross- cultural relevance of existing theories.

  Happiness at Work: A Shield Against Toxicity · 2026 · DOI

• The gap between the depiction of emotional environments as uniformly advantageous for creativity and voice, and the potential for emotional norms to restrict expression. The lack of understanding of the workplace conditions under which employees choose to suppress rather than express their creative ideas.

  Emotional Culture, Communication Climate, and Creative Idea Withholding: A Curvilinear Perspective · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Emotional Labor in Professions

• PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONS OF PERSONAL ENGAGEMENT AND DISENGAGEMENT AT WORK. · Academy of Management Journal · 1990 · 12,398 citations
• Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure · American Journal of Sociology · 1979 · 4,016 citations
• Making sense of the meaning literature: An integrative review of meaning making and its effects on adjustment to stressful life events. · Psychological Bulletin · 2010 · 2,471 citations
• Emotional Labor and Burnout: Comparing Two Perspectives of “People Work” · Journal of Vocational Behavior · 2002 · 1,663 citations
• Expression of Emotion as Part of the Work Role · Academy of Management Review · 1987 · 1,609 citations
• Relational Job Design and the Motivation to Make a Prosocial Difference · Academy of Management Review · 2007 · 1,415 citations
• Lack of method variance in self-reported affect and perceptions at work: Reality or artifact? · Journal of Applied Psychology · 1989 · 1,351 citations
• Emotional exhaustion as a predictor of job performance and voluntary turnover. · Journal of Applied Psychology · 1998 · 1,145 citations
• Organizational Behavior: Affect in the Workplace · Annual Review of Psychology · 2002 · 1,136 citations
• SERVICE WITH A SMILE: EMOTIONAL CONTAGION IN THE SERVICE ENCOUNTER. · Academy of Management Journal · 2001 · 1,017 citations

Most recent work

• Reckoning With the Ideal Worker Body: A Qualitative Study of Workers in Chronic Pain · Academy of Management Journal · 2026
• The Role of Chinese EFL Teachers' Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Their Work Engagement and Buoyancy: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed‐Methods Research · European Journal of Education · 2026
• The curvilinear nature of employee flourishing: longitudinal evidence on workplace dignity and positive emotions across career stages · Career Development International · 2026
• Women engineers in leadership: navigating emotional labour and emotion stereotypes · European Journal of Engineering Education · 2026
• Gender equity and emotional labour in the workplace: an ethnographic study · Frontiers in Sociology · 2026
• Emotional labor demands, stratification, and mental health pathways in Europe: Evidence from the European working conditions survey · Social Science & Medicine · 2026
• Negotiating agency at the intersection of culture and accountability: Exploring the emotional labor of novice teachers in China · Teaching and Teacher Education · 2026
• RETRACTED: Latent profiles of teacher Well-Being: Linking emotional labor strategies to classroom climate across a national sample in China · Teaching and Teacher Education · 2026
• When guest delight feeds host fatigue: Emotional labor dynamics among frontline employees in a Chinese scenic area · Tourism Management · 2026
• Emotion Work and Spousal Dementia Caregiving: Influences of Gender and Sexual Orientation · Journal of Health and Social Behavior · 2026

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