Emotional labor in business life and an empirical study

This study aims to analyse the impact of the `emotional labor? on the employees? levels of job satisfaction and burnout. Emotional labor is defined as the effort of employees, who are in face to face interaction with customers, to align their emotional manifestations with the standards defined by the organization. For this purpose, hypotheses that are developed in the light of the literature study held to analyse the concept, tested with a fieldwork. The sample of the fieldwork carried out in Manisa consists of 136 doctors. The sample was applied a survey includes the Emotional Labor Scale consisted 26 questions; the Michigan Organizational Assessment Job Satisfaction Sub-scale consisted 3 questions; the Maslach Burnout Inventory and demographic questions.Analyses carried out on the data show that while surface acting increases the level of burnout and decreases the level of job satisfaction, a strong relationship was not observed between deep acting and burnout or job satisfaction. On the other hand, analyses reveal several changes in extend of emotional labor, depending on the different sectors employees operate within. Accordingly, public sector employees resort more on surface acting than their private sector counterparts and show more emotional effort than they do. Results derived from the analyses are not contradictory with the literature.For it is one of the first studies in Turkey aims to measure and evaluate the emotional labor, this study is expected to contribute the field and also the following researchers.