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

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.