Job Burnout of Construction Project Managers: Exploring the Consequences of Regulating Emotions in Workplace

Abstract

Construction project managers (CPMs) need to handle project tasks through interpersonal interaction, which always involves emotion. Thus, CPMs must perform emotional labor. Different emotional labor strategies, namely, surface acting (i.e., faking emotional expressions) and deep acting (i.e., modifying feelings), may cause different levels of stress and influence job burnout. This paper investigates the impacts of two components of emotional labor, emotional display demands and emotional labor strategies, on CPMs’ job burnout. It also examines the moderating effect of emotional intelligence (EI) between emotional display demands and emotional labor strategies. Data from 234 questionnaire surveys were analyzed with structural equation modeling. The results show that CPMs who choose surface acting as a strategy to regulate emotions in the workplace will be under more stress and encounter job burnout. In addition, CPMs with higher EI are less inclined to choose surface acting and thus experience less job burnout. This paper extends emotional labor research into the construction project context and provides evidence that studying job burnout from an emotional labor perspective generates useful insights into the causes of CPMs’ job burnout.