The Effect of Emotional Labour on Burnout:A Case of Study in Hotel Businesses

The labour intensive feature and long working hours in hotel businesses is likely to increase the burnout level of the staff in contact with customers face to face. Maslach et al. (2001: 399) defines burnout as individuals’ emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and low personal accomplishment that in connection with intensively people. Burnout is mainly approached with three dimensions, namely emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and low personal accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion refers to a person’s exhausted emotional state and resources. Depersonalization signifies negative, insensitive, and overreaction attitude towards the customers. Low personal achievement, however, states individuals’ belief in low productivity and insufficiency. Individual and organizational factors are a matter of augmenting employees’ burnout levels. In this study, emotional labour has come to the forefront. Hoschchild (1983: 7) carried out the study as regarding the flight attendants and defines emotional labour as ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’. Emotional labour consists of two dimensions, surface acting and deep acting. In this frame, the aim of this study is to determine the effect of emotional labour behaviour on burnout of employees working in 4 and 5-star hotels-Nevşehir city. With this aim; the data which was gathered through questionnaires and applied to the employees working in 4 and 5-star hotels, in the departments of front office, housekeeping and food and beverage-Nevşehir, is analysed. According to regression analysis results; it is observed that the deep acting dimension of emotional labour has a negative and significant effect on emotional exhaustion and depersonalization while it has a positive and significant effect on personal accomplishment. It is analysed that surface acting dimension has a positive and significant effect only on depersonalization but has no effect on emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment. Besides the results, some limitations of these findings for theory and practice, and recommendations for future research directions are presented.