A qualitative research to understand the impact of professional norms on emotional labor practices of physicians, judges, and teachers

The concept of emotional labor is defined as the management of emotions as part of daily work performance. Much of the research in this area relates to jobs in the service industry, where employees need to shape their own emotions to make customers feel comfortable, happy, or at peace. But little attention has been paid to the importance of emotional labor in professional occupations. At this point, the aim of this study is to reveal the effect of professional norms on emotional labor behaviors and to explain the individual consequences of these behaviors. In this context, it is thought to provide rich information on the subject and historically early institutionalized; Teachers, physicians and retired judges who are practiced based on intense communication and interaction and therefore have a professional context that will enable rich determinations for emotional labor behaviors were selected and semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with them and content analysis was applied to the data. The main themes of emotion management, professional ethics and professionalism and social support emerged as the phenomena explaining the emotional labor behavior of teachers. As a result of the content analysis of the interviews with the physicians, two main themes emerged as emotion management, professional ethics and professionalism. As a result of the content analysis of the interviews with retired judges, emotion management, professional norms and professionalism were determined as the main themes. In the light of these findings, it was concluded that occupational norms have an effect on emotional labor behavior in all three occupational groups.