Impact of Workplace Spirituality in Reducing Emotional Labour Among Academics

Abstract

It has been long recognized that everyone wears an emotional mask. Specially, in the context of the service sector, job requirements mandate display rules requiring the expression of certain emotions that may not necessarily be felt by employees. Such regulation of emotions often leads to stress and burnout that negatively impact employees' physical and psychological health. Emotional labour is thus a worrisome phenomenon. Against this backdrop, this chapter concerns itself with finding solutions that could potentially alleviate the associated problems of personal and organizational well-being. Extant literature observes numerous suggestions about these detrimental effects being mitigated by spirituality. Academics recommend that organizations could employ workplace spirituality initiatives to replenish the emotional resources exhausted due to emotional labour. This chapter thus addresses the empirical association between workplace spirituality and emotional labour among teachers in higher education sector – the service professionals claimed to be most negatively impacted by emotional labour.