Emotional labor and psychological distress: the mediating effect of work family conflict

With the development of the service industry in which interaction among people is intensely common, changes in the characteristics of labor are also experienced. Proper emotional display as well as knowledge, capability and brawn have been expected from employees by both employers and customers. Emotional display, set out sincerely or due to work, and described as emotional labor may cause employees to experience work-family conflict and psychological distress. For this reason, with a study on defence sector, effects of emotional labor on family-work conflict and psychological distress are analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling. As a result of the analysis it is determined that, of the dimensions of emotional labor; Automatic Emotion Regulation (AER), Emotional deviance(ED) and Work-Family Conflict (WFC) significantly affect psychological distress dimension but AER and ED do not significantly affect WFC and that WFC does not have a mediating effect.