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Abstract
A substantial body of research has explored emotional labour over the past three decades. Emotional labour involves commercialising employees’ emotions in exchange for wages and the much of the extant research has focused on Western employees. Examining emotional labour in a non-Western environment, such as Sri Lanka, provides a valuable opportunity to explore how different cultural and contextual factors shape emotional labour. Using a qualitative case study approach and drawing on 114 interviews, this thesis explores how public and private sector nurses and frontline hotel employees experienced and responded to emotional labour in Sri Lanka.
This research examines the roles of managers, customers, third parties, colleagues, the work environment, culture and religion on employees’ experiences of emotional labour. High power distance and high uncertainty avoidance cultures in the private hospital and hotels led managers to actively control and monitor employees’ behaviour. This resulted in a sense of powerlessness among many hotel employees. Public hospital nurses worked in an environment of significant understaffing, limited resources and demanding patients. Having to constantly regulate their emotions while responding to customer misbehaviour and adverse working conditions, gave rise to job burnout amongst hotel employees and nurses. Further, these employees experienced work/family conflicts and increased workplace conflicts with co-workers. Women workers experienced these negative consequences more than males, highlighting the gendered nature of emotional labour. Hotel employees and nurses used a variety of coping strategies influenced by culture, religion and gender in response to the emotional labour challenges they experienced.