Managing Emotions at Work: A TCCM Systematic Literature Review of Empirical Emotional Labour Research

ABSTRACT

Emotional labour (EL) has become a serious concern in the modern workplace due to the rapid development of the service‐oriented economy. Existing literature reviews of emotional labour studies leave many questions unexplored. This study addresses these questions by conducting a holistic review of 143 high‐impact empirical articles published in peer‐reviewed journals from APA PsycInfo, EBSCO Academic Search Premier, Scopus, and Web of Science using the TCCM framework (Theory‐Context‐Characteristics‐Methodology). The document search process is visualised with a PRISMA diagram. We point out several future directions for scholars who are interested in emotional labour. For example, emotional labour research needs to transition from cross‐sectional designs to multi‐wave designs. Most importantly, this study serves as a roadmap for scholars to navigate the complexity of emotional labour research and provides practitioners with evidence‐based strategies to mitigate the negative influence of emotional labour.