Coping with emotional labor in high stress hospitality work environments

Abstract

Hospitality environments, particularly casino VIP rooms, are often overlooked as “high stress” work environments. Faced with challenging work situations, frontline employees experience tremendous emotional demands during interpersonal interactions. As this leads to emotional exhaustion, frontline employees must find ways of managing emotional labor through coping strategies to reduce its negative impacts. This research explores strategies that VIP room’s frontline employees use in coping with emotional demands. The research identifies four families of strategies: opposition, rumination, emotional regulation, and positive cognitive restructuring, corresponding to surface acting, deep acting and genuine emotions, respectively. The study opens new avenues for further understanding of the coping and emotional labor concepts.