Emotional labor and burnout relationship: A research on tourist guides working in the Aegean Region

The companies ask their employees to display some predetermined emotional display rules by the organization. The emotional effort made by the employees in order to fulfill the demands of the company, is defined as emotional labor. Emotional Labor has been important within physical and mental labor. Some negative consequences can arise in the circumstances when the demanded emotions are dissonant with employee's own emotions and one of the most negative consequences is burnout syndrome. However the relationship between emotional labor and burnout has been researched since 1980s in many sectors; the number of the researches done on tourist guidance as one of the most important fields of tourism service industry, is seen insufficient. Tourist guidance as a characteristic job, can require displaying the emotions demanded by the people who may come from all over the world belonged to hundreds of diffirent cultures, apart from displaying the only emotional rules of the company. This situation makes important researching the emotional labor of tourist guides and burnout as a possible consequence. In this thesis, it is aimed to identify the relationship between emotional labor behaviours and burnout levels of tourist guides working in Aegean Region as one of the most busy touristic regions of Turkey. Quantitative techniques were used to obtain the data used in the research. The most suitable scales have been determined for tourist guidance and 264 tourist guides completed surveys. The results include some significant findings which indicate that the tour guides mostly display the surface acting of emotional labor in high levels and related to this, guides are experiencing emotional burnout and dissonance. Although this negative situation shows a positive change in some variables; guides often tend to suppress their inner emotions. The results obtained from this research, provide important findings for tour guide educational institutions, occupational chambers and tourist guides. KEY WORDS: Tourist Guide, Emotional Labor, Burnout