Purpose

The concept of emotional labor refers to the management of emotions in interaction with customers. This study aims to suggest an integrative definition of emotional labor. It develops a conceptual framework that helps organize and synthesize key insights from the literature, in an interactional and multi-level perspective.

Design/methodology/approach

This integrated framework consists in a mapping of key research themes resulting from a systematic literature review, which includes research in sales and marketing. As critical affective processes in sales have not been studied sufficiently, both in business-to-business and business-to-customer selling, this review also incorporates works in other research fields.

Findings

Sales representatives’ emotional labor must be considered as a bi-directional interaction with the customer in a multi-level perspective. Moreover, emotional labor has rather negative consequences for the salesperson (e.g. burnout and job stress), but may have positive sales and customer outcomes. Findings suggest that the expression of genuine emotions should be used during sales interactions. In addition, organizations should prevent customers’ negative behaviors (e.g. mistreatment).

Practical implications

Emotional labor key practical implications with regard to several management functions such as the recruitment, performance management and training (Ashkanasy and Daus, 2002) of the sales representatives.

Originality/value

Research on emotional labor in a sales ecosystem is scarce. It has largely covered service industry employees in contact with customers, but has not paid enough attention to sales representatives (Mikeska et al., 2015). The proposed integrated framework concerning emotional labor focuses on the bi-directional interaction between the sales representatives and their customers.

中文翻译：

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销售生态系统中的情感劳动：销售人员-客户交互框架

目的

情绪劳动的概念是指与客户互动时对情绪的管理。本研究旨在提出情感劳动的综合定义。它开发了一个概念框架，以交互和多层次的视角帮助组织和综合来自文献的重要见解。

设计/方法/方法

这个集成的框架包含对关键研究主题的映射，这些主题是通过系统的文献综述而得出的，其中包括销售和营销方面的研究。由于在企业对企业和企业对客户的销售中，对销售中的关键情感过程都没有进行充分的研究，因此本综述还纳入了其他研究领域的著作。

发现

从多层次的角度来看，销售代表的情感劳动必须被视为与客户的双向互动。此外，情绪劳动对销售人员有相当负面的影响（例如，精疲力尽和工作压力），但可能对销售和客户产生积极的影响。研究结果表明，在销售互动中应使用真实的情感表达。此外，组织应防止客户的不良行为（例如虐待）。

实际影响

情感劳动在几个管理职能方面的关键实际影响，例如销售代表的招聘，绩效管理和培训（Ashkanasy和Daus，2002年）。

创意/价值

在销售生态系统中对情感劳动的研究很少。它在很大程度上涵盖了服务行业与客户接触的员工，但对销售代表的关注却不够（Mikeska等，2015）。拟议中的有关情绪劳动的综合框架着重于销售代表与其客户之间的双向交互。