What Do We Know about Emotional Labour in the Nursing Profession? A Literature Narrative Review

Nurses have to manage their emotions and the emotion expressions to perform best care, and their behaviours pass through emotional labour (EL). However, EL seems to be an under-appreciated aspect of caring work and there is not a synthetic portrait of literature about EL in the nursing profession. Hence,this review was conductedto synthesize and to critically analyse the literature in the nursing field related to the emotional labour (EL). Twenty-seven papers were included and analysed with a narrative approach, where two main themes was found: (a) EL strategies and (b) EL antecedents and consequences. Hence, EL is a multidimensional, complex concept and it represents a nursing competence to perform the best caring. Moreover, nurses have a highawareness of EL as a professional competence, which is a fundamental element to balance engagement with an appropriate degree of detachment to accomplish some tasks aimed to perform the best behaviour, and to achieve good results for the patients’ caring. Introduction The pith of nursing is caring for others (Watson, 2005; Wu & Cheng, 2006). Nurses face human suffering in their work daily, and they must provide the best care possible to soften patients’ distress rather than simply perform technical tasks (Bolton, 2005). The literature about nursing profession shows that most nurses perform emotional labour(EL), as they recognize that their feelings are not congruent with the caring emotions they should experience professionally (Smith &Lorentzon, 2005). According to Hochschild’s theory (1983), EL is the process by which workers have to manage their feelings in accordance with organizationally defined rules and guidelines to produce ‘the proper state of mind in others...the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place’ (Hochschild, 2003: 7). In other terms, EL refers to a worker’s endeavour to display emotions according to embedded social and cultural norms rather than according to what he or she actually feels (Huynh et al., 2008). According to the original conceptualization of Hochschild work, EL is an occupational requirement of waged work environments, that induces the outward expression of certain emotions during the interactions and that implies the management of feelings/emotions (Hochschild, 1983; 2003). From this first conceptualization different disciplines (e.g. sociology, psychology, medicine, management), in over 30 years of research on this topic, adopted different research perspectives and different ways to conceptualize and investigate the EL. Moreover, the literature regarding EL is very lively in relation to the different samples, methods and instruments to