By Akanksha Juneja, Supervised by Dr. Anna Rostomyan
Globalization has increased communication with a diverse mix of individuals. Steering diversity is emotionally challenging for employees and leaders. Hence, management of emotions during workplace plays a key role in creating an equitable and inclusive environment.
Emotions are defined as appraisals of external stimuli. These appraisals result in either positive or negative responses. Through emotion regulation, individuals can control the appraisal and the type of response. When people engage in conversations (face-to-face or voice-to-voice), they have to maintain a demeanor. It requires effort, especially when external stimuli trigger emotions that do not match the genuine emotions within an individual. Hochschild (1983) defined this effort as emotion labor. The effort is enhanced when organizations establish norms, structures and expectations. Thereby, complexity of emotion labor at work increases for management of diversity at the workplace. Roberson (2006) detangled the synonymously used terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Diversity is the differences in individuals based on the demographics – measurable characteristics like race, gender, ethnicity. Inclusion refers to an environment protected by policies to remove obstacles to commitment, involvement, and engagement. Finally, Equity means distribution of resources and opportunities to treat everyone with fairness in a community or organization. Furthermore, Kanitz (2024) exemplified the ways in which employees respond to DE&I. Employees can be excited supporters with active engagement, or calm compliers showing passive participation that lacks leading initiatives. Employees can also be torn shapers who resist the manner in which these initiatives are conducted. Finally, the disconnected opponents who challenge the cause entirely. The employees can act as allies, challengers or participate in the initiatives. The way they choose to respond is governed by emotional responses. Therefore, emotion labor extends to all ranks within an organisation, roles, industries and diversity, through similar mechanism.
Figure 1: Reported Job Roles Affected by Emotion Labor of DE&I
Note. This graph illustrates frequency of responses 1-5 on ELS modified for DE&I initiatives from employees at different roles.
As shown in Figure 1, less than 40% of participants, belonging to HR and operations, report the majority of responses as “Never”. Subordinates responded to most questions with “sometimes”, “often and “very often”. Graphically representation of responses show that subordinates bear the burden of emotion labor of DE&I initiatives, followed by HR and individuals in operations. Further, it is proposed that role of emotion labor of DE&I initiatives is paradoxical on employees.
Emotion labor as a paradox
According to Hochschild (1983) “Emotion labor operates through two components – surface acting and deep acting”. Surface acting is defined as hiding expression of true emotions by masking them. For example, when flight attendants have to express neutral or positive emotions even with angry passengers, they engage in surface acting. Surface acting emerges when individuals with high prejudices overcompensate with positive emotions during DE&I discussions (Burns et al., 2008). Employees accepting positive emotions expressed by female leaders as a reflection of traditional views about gender roles (Garden, 2016).
The other component is deep acting. It refers to altering the feelings internally, then modifying the external emotion expression. For example, thinking of customers as children when assisting them on flights to avoid getting frustrated (Hochschild, 1983). Deep acting manifest upon continuous exposure to intangible actions of DE&I initiatives. Employees tend to participate in such initiatives due to compliance than authenticity. They feel more emotionally exhausted than empowered because of lack of tangible changes or progress. This phenomenon of limiting the ability of an individual to oppose and obligatory participation is called rhetoric coercion. Research shows some organisations focus on inclusive and diverse image rather than implementation of actions to improve DE&I. Consequently, adding to the emotional pressure of maintaining neutral emotion expression while being exposed to overcompensated expression of emotions from privileged groups (Wong, 2007).
Diversity report from Intel Corporation showed overall numbers with 44.1% white, 36.3% Asian, 9.3% Hispanic/Latinx, and 4.9% African American. Within the diversity of demographics, there is a difference in gender distribution for job roles. While males dominated all departments, women represented 54.2% of non-technical sectors (Global Data, 2025). Similarly, diversity course educators emotionally respond to the experience with “anger”. While responses like “disappointment” and “empowerment” were recorded for male and female instructors respectively, within the same race (Moore et al., 2010). Data reveals openness to diversity, but no report of career growth, hiring status, promotion numbers. Consequently, working in diverse environments with no substantive progress demonstrates token support builds emotion suppression.
Another challenge, adding to the paradox, is microaggression. It is defined as subtle biases like micro insults, jokes during interactions at work. Microaggressions can be in the form of compliments. For example, “a credit to her race” suggesting certain ethnic groups are to be considered intellectually inferior. Black Women Faculty manage expression suppression towards microaggression through emotion regulation. Thus, understanding microaggression can address resistance towards DEI initiatives (Raider-Roth et al., 2021)
Even though, DE&I initiatives offer many advantages like innovation, work performance, growth, and expansion in the global market. Since, emotion labor manifests as a product of rhetoric coercion, token support and microaggression, research affirms role of emotion labor of DE&I is paradoxical. These studies help to identify gaps and build strategies to tackle challenges.
Figure 2: Organisational Support for desired by Employees
Figure 2 demonstrates, emotion support and therapy strategies to be the most desired form of organisational support needed by employees, followed by feedback and discussions. Many employees show no awareness of organisational solutions towards emotion labor of DE&I initiatives. Lastly, very few employees feel that relationships with colleagues can improve impact of emotion labor of DE&I. These themes help to identify strategies to deal with the multifaceted phenomenon of emotion labor of DE&I initiatives.
Strategies for Managing Emotion Labor of DE&I
1. Elimination biases through leadership
Social identity is formed due to shared values and beliefs. It prevents prejudice driven in-group and out-group biases. Leaders can provide an environment that builds such groups of shared goals (Dencheva Yordanova & Yordanova Dineva, 2022). Once individuals identify themselves aligned to a group that promotes diversity, equity and inclusion, it creates a sense of belonging and reduces resistance. Consistent rewarding systems, encouragement and empathy can enhance manager – employee relationships at work. Relationships amongst employees can also increase level of involvement and engagement in tasks. To prevent dissonance, managers can train employees to internalise emotions associated with a role. Relationship building exercises during DE&I events can focus less on vulnerabilities of sharing past experiences and engage in deep acting exercises. Managers should build quality relationships by listening and modelling ideal behaviour (Kogovsek & Kogovsek, 2014).
2. Building emotional resilience
One way to combat negative effects of emotion labor is better appraisal of the situation. Emotional intelligence, though not linked directly to emotion labor, offers a path to address emotion labor. Emotion awareness and regulation components of emotional intelligence can facilitate better appraisal of situations and reduce emotion labor (Brotheridge, 2006). DE&I training sessions can address microaggression by building interventions principally around emotional intelligence. Evoking genuine emotions for roles lead to more authentic interactions, creates inclusivity. Thus, interventions could focus on utilising emotion intelligence for emotion induced DE&I challenges.
3. Counselling and emotion support
Furthermore, preventive measures could go beyond addressing, training and feedback. Creating an open and safe environment helps employees to express their concerns. Therapists should assist DE&I initiatives to monitor the wellbeing of employees at every level. Therapy and emotional support sessions should be conducted for the individuals acting out such biases and for the individuals experiencing them (Velazquez et al., 2022).
4. Transparency and data driven results.
DE&I initiatives need data driven actions and results. Companies need to focus on making process metrics which aim at hiring, promotion and tracking career growth of diverse groups (Williams & Dolkas, 2022). Considering an example of a bank that hired employees as support staff that didn’t possess college degrees. Years later, the staff challenged the policy, no promotion without a college degree, as they trained for years under the organization to become loan officers. As a result, it pushed the management to consider long service support staff for the role of loan officers. Today, the bank is under a transformation by changing policies under hiring and promoting (Thomas & Ely, 1996).
Conclusion
Tackling emotion labor is challenging but handling it within the scope of DE&I is even more complex. Both have impactful presence in organisations, and poor management of either or both in combination can result in paramount repercussions like burnout, poor well-being, employee dissatisfaction and exhaustion. However, emotion labor when managed properly, can result in smooth transformation within companies through its components. Additionally, DE&I initiatives can use this component of emotion labor through several strategies suggested in the article.
