Emotional Labor And Well-Being

Student affairs work often requires the regular negotiation between felt and displayed emotions. Consider the residential life professional who attends an early morning meeting with only a few hours of sleep after responding to a student crisis. Although they may feel tired, drained, and irritable, they must project an attitude of caring, concern, and responsiveness. Also, consider the career services professional meeting with a senior student who has waited until a month before graduation to start their job search. This may engender feelings of frustration, but the staff member must put aside their frustration to meet organizational perceptions of professionalism. These two hypothetical cases could have been replaced with an endless list of examples of how student affairs professionals engage in emotional labor, defined as the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display (Hochschild, 1983), to meet the stated and unstated requirements of their job. But what is the impact of negotiating this type of labor on student affairs professionals?<p></p>