Effect of Emotional Labor on Emotional Exhaustion of Female Nurses in Sri Lankan Hospitals

Abstract

The competition within the service sector made the organizations to think not only about satisfying their consumers but also about going beyond that and delighting their customers. The revolutionary concept of “emotional labor” has emerged as a result of this concept “quality of service”. The present study examines the concepts emotional labor, its two dimensions: surface acting and deep acing and emotional exhaustion. This exploratory study selected hundred nurses under convenience sampling method and used a 43 item survey to collect data. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses. In the results of the study it has been determined that there is a relationship between emotional labor and emotional exhaustion, surface acting has a positive relationship with emotional exhaustion while deep acting has a negative relationship with emotional exhaustion which was consistent with previous research findings. In addition it is found that surface acting is the more dominant variable that effect emotional exhaustion. The study has implications for the ways by which nurses manage their emotional exhaustion at their employment. The issue of generalizing the findings over the population, time availability and access restrictions to the hospitals has been identified as limitations of the study.