Managing Job Burnout

The Effects of Emotion-Regulation Ability, Emotional Labor, and Positive and Negative Affect at Work

Zhao, Jia-Lin
Li, Xu-Hong
Shields, John

Department of Sociology, College of Humanities and Communications, Shanghai Normal University
Department of Business Administration, School of Management, Fudan University
Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies, The University of Sydney Business School

This study was supported in part by University of Sydney Business School Postgraduate Research Award, the Humanities & Social Science Grant from the Ministry of Education, P. R. China (15YJCZH233 - “Social Emotions and Herd Behaviors”, 13YJA630048) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71372117).

Some of the data in the manuscript was used in a paper presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Philadelphia (August, 2014) with abstract listed in the conference proceedings.

Xu-Hong Li, Department of Business Administration, School of Management, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433 [email protected]

Received August 28, 2017

revised March 31, 2018

Accepted April 5, 2018

International Journal of Stress Management 26(3):p 315-320, August 2019. | DOI: 10.1037/str0000101

The authors examine the relationship between emotion-regulation ability, a key branch of emotional intelligence, and job burnout in 343 Chinese employees from a wide range of occupations and find that emotion-regulation ability is negatively related to job burnout, especially in jobs that require high emotional labor. An objective performance-based test of emotional intelligence shows that positive work affect partially mediates the relationship between emotion-regulation ability and burnout. The study refines understanding of how, to what degree, and under what circumstances emotional intelligence is related to job burnout.