Abstract
Research on emotional labour has blossomed in recent years. However, despite a myriad of studies and conceptual reflections, the physiological dimension of emotional labour and the interactions with cognition have remained largely absent from literature. This paper aims to bring the body out of the shadows by connecting the literature on emotional labour with that on the corporeal lived experience (which links the body with consciousness and cognition). In order not to ‘succumb’ to dualism or, as Dennett says, the ‘Cartesian theatre’, we propose a novel conceptual model of emotional labour and its nomological network, which could open innovative avenues for future research. In a time of multifarious crises, such as the Covid-19 crisis, rising inflation and war, everyone is ‘under attack’, physically, psychologically, mentally, and emotionally. This means that multiple human crises overlay the economic crises faced by organizations and that crises and disruptions are now part and parcel of everyday organizational life. Building disruptive sustainability is therefore a multifaceted challenge, which impacts all the functions and processes of the organization. Human Resource Management (HRM) plays a crucial and strategic role in this matter and should both be sustainable and foster sustainability, which means ensuring the preservation of occupational health. Indeed, from a holistic perspective, healthy workers mean healthy teams and organizations, sustainable organizations in other words. Emotional labour has been proved to be challenging to perform in settings characterized by high emotional demands and its deleterious effects on health has been documented. Finding innovative ways to improve the practice of emotional labour in a sustainable, ecological way for individuals and teams but also to mitigate its deleterious effects is paramount to developing disruptive sustainability. By bringing the body into the equation, our conceptual model suggests new disruptive ideas that we consider both pertinent and original. Its heuristic nature offers food for thought by proposing complementary research paths to those currently dominating organizational psychology and thus opening new avenues for a ‘body-integrative’ perspective on emotional labour.