Emotional Demands at Work: A Job Content Analysis

Abstract

Using qualitative and quantitative evidence from studies of several occupations in the public sector, the authors evaluate dimensions of emotional labor in the content of work performed by registered nurses, police officers, and managers. Two indexes are constructed to measure a range of emotional skills and demands found in these historically female and male jobs. The authors find that the emotional labor required of police officers and registered nurses is comparable despite the cultural ideology that portrays these jobs as requiring gender-specific skills. The authors demonstrate the utility and increased accuracy of using an augmented conceptualization of emotional labor to measure what employees actually do in performing their jobs. It is proposed that those studying emotional labor abandon their reliance on preconceived stereotypes of femininity when studying emotional labor, especially in service sector jobs.