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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY
published: 29 August 2022
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.849566
Edited by:
Tanja Hentschel,
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Reviewed by:
Jamie L. Gloor,
University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
Richard Ronay,
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
*Correspondence:
Andrea C. Vial
andrea.vial@nyu.edu
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Gender, Sex and Sexualities,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 06 January 2022
Accepted: 03 June 2022
Published: 29 August 2022
Citation:
Vial AC and Cowgill CM (2022)
Heavier Lies Her Crown: Gendered
Patterns of Leader Emotional Labor
and Their Downstream Effects.
Front. Psychol. 13:849566.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.849566
Heavier Lies Her Crown: Gendered
Patterns of Leader Emotional Labor
and Their Downstream Effects
Andrea C. Vial*and Colleen M. Cowgill
Department of Psychology, Division of Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Women use power in more prosocial ways than men and they also engage in more
emotional labor (i.e., self-regulate their emotions to respond and attend to the needs
and emotions of other people in a way that advances organizational goals). However,
these two constructs have not been previously connected. We propose that gendered
emotional labor practices and pressures result in gender differences in the prosocial use
of power. We integrate the literature on emotional labor with research on the psychology
of power to articulate three routes through which this happens. First, women may
be more adept than men at the intrapersonal and interpersonal processes entailed in
emotional labor practices—a skill that they can apply at all hierarchical levels. Second,
given women’s stronger internal motivation to perform emotional labor, they construe
power in a more interdependent manner than men, which promotes a more prosocial
use of power. As a result, female powerholders tend to behave in more prosocial ways.
Third, when they have power, women encounter stronger external motivation to engage
in emotional labor, which effectively constrains powerful women’s behaviors in a way
that fosters a more prosocial use of power. We discuss how, by promoting prosocial
behavior among powerholders, emotional labor can be beneficial for subordinates
and organizations (e.g., increase employee well-being and organizational trust), while
simultaneously creating costs for individual powerholders, which may reduce women’s
likelihood of actually attaining and retaining power by (a) making high-power roles
less appealing, (b) guiding women toward less prestigious and (c) more precarious
leadership roles, (d) draining powerful women’s time and resources without equitable
rewards, and (e) making it difficult for women to legitimize their power in the eyes of
subordinates (especially men). Thus, emotional labor practices can help explain the
underrepresentation of women in top leadership positions.
Keywords: emotional labor, gender, power, leadership, emotion, prosocial behavior
INTRODUCTION
When they have power, women tend to behave in more prosocial ways than men. For example, a
meta-analysis of 162 studies by Eagly and Johnson (1990) found a stronger tendency in women than
in men to lead in an interpersonally oriented style in laboratory experiments. Across studies, women
in positions of authority were more likely than men in those positions to prioritize the maintenance
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Vial and Cowgill Gender and Leader Emotional Labor
of interpersonal relationships, to tend to the morale and welfare
of others, or to show consideration for others—e.g., helping
and doing favors for subordinates. Subsequent meta-analyses
confirmed these early conclusions (van Engen and Willemsen,
2004). Clearly, many female powerholders show no shortage
of care for others, even when some scholars have argued that
power can unleash self-serving and often destructive behavior
that is insensitive to the needs of other people (e.g., Anderson
et al., 2003;Keltner et al., 2003;Van Kleef et al., 2008;Lammers
et al., 2012;Rucker and Galinsky, 2016). But what makes
female powerholders more interpersonally sensitive than their
male counterparts? And what are the consequences of women’s
tendency to wield power “with a velvet glove” (i.e., in a more
prosocial way)?
We posit that the answer to these questions partly lies on
gendered patterns of emotional labor—which we define as the
act of self-regulating one’s emotions to respond and attend
to others’ needs and emotions in a manner that advances
organizational goals (Hochschild, 1983;Grandey, 2000;Cheung
and Tang, 2010). We argue that women in power behave in a
more prosocial manner than men because they have a stronger
tendency to practice emotional labor. These gender1differences
have a mixed set of consequences: On the one hand, women’s
more prosocial use of power can be beneficial for subordinates
and organizations. On the other hand, we argue that gendered
emotional labor practices can simultaneously create costs for
individual powerholders—especially when emotional labor is
externally motivated—and undermine gender equality in top
leadership positions in multiple ways. Here, we integrate the
previously disconnected literatures on emotional labor and the
psychology of power to articulate three routes through which
this happens. We contribute to existing models of gender and
leadership by identifying emotional labor as a key construct that
can illuminate why men and women express power differently
and why it is more difficult for women to attain and retain
powerful roles (Vial et al., 2016).
Power is often defined as the extent to which an individual
exerts asymmetric control or influence over others (Schmid Mast
et al., 2009)—for example, having the authority to issue orders
that others must follow, or controlling access to valued resources
(Magee and Frasier, 2014)—while also being free from others,
or having the discretion to operate autonomously, unfettered by
the will and needs of other people (Fast et al., 2009;Inesi et al.,
2011;Lammers et al., 2016). Ostensibly, then, power runs counter
to emotional labor, as the latter prioritizes accommodating
the emotions of other people rather than imposing one’s own
views independently from others (Rucker and Galinsky, 2016).
Conversely, we propose that when people in power engage in
emotional labor, this practice may foster a more prosocial use
1Throughout this article, we use the term gender to refer to the behavioral,
social, and psychological characteristics of women and men (as well as norms
and expectations about them), which are frequently associated with the biological
categories of female and male (e.g., Deaux, 1985;Pryzgoda and Chrisler, 2000).
We favor the term gender over the term sex in our writing because, although it is
impossible to fully know the extent of biological and environmental influences on
human behavior, the term gender has more inclusive implications than the term
sex (Frieze and Chrisler, 2011).
of power, one that is considerate of others and that promotes
or protects their welfare (Batson, 2012). We contribute to the
literature on the psychology of power (e.g., Sassenberg et al., 2014;
Sturm and Antonakis, 2015;Tost and Johnson, 2019;Foulk et al.,
2020) by identifying emotional labor practices as an important
antecedent to prosocial power use—one that can help explain
why men and women in high-power roles may behave differently.
We argue that gender differences in emotional labor practices
and demands translate into women’s more prosocial use of power
in at least three ways (Figure 1). First, women have a stronger
ability than men to practice emotional labor (Figure 1,path
a), a skill that underlies the prosocial use of power. Second,
women have a stronger internal motivation than men to perform
emotional labor (Figure 1,path b), which may lead women
to construe power in an interdependent manner that fosters
prosocial rather than self-serving behavior. And third, women
face stronger external demands than men to practice emotional
labor (Figure 1,path c), which constrain powerful women’s ability
to exercise their authority in self-serving ways. In the sections that
follow, we integrate the literatures on emotional labor and the
psychology of power to develop a theoretical framework in which
we articulate these three pathways connecting emotional labor
to female powerholders’ prosocial use of power (Figure 1,path
g) as well as positive and negative consequences for individuals,
groups, and gender equality at large (Figure 1,paths j-l). We
begin by discussing gender differences in emotional labor and
then review research that supports the claim that women are
more likely than men to behave in a prosocial way when they
occupy high-power roles.
WHAT IS EMOTIONAL LABOR AND
WHAT ARE ITS ANTECEDENTS?
A variety of social settings have tacit (and sometimes explicit)
norms or “display rules” for what is an acceptable or desirable
emotional expression. These norms delineate socially appropriate
ways of interacting with others, including whether and to what
degree felt emotions should be expressed (Ekman and Friesen,
1975;Matsumoto, 1990). At its core, emotional labor is the
regulation of felt and expressed emotions (whether effortful or
not) to match these emotional display rules with the objective of
fulfilling organizational goals (Hochschild, 1983;Grandey, 2000;
Cheung and Tang, 2010). People practice emotion regulation
in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., students at school, spouses
at home; Gross, 1998); however, emotional labor specifically
occurs when people deploy emotion regulation strategies to
meet organizational goals (Grandey, 2000). For example, when
an employee in a service job continues to smile to an angry
customer to prevent them from leaving the establishment, or
when an employee masks their feelings of frustration during
a long staff meeting to preserve harmony within the team.
Indeed, emotional labor has tangible organizational benefits, as
it fosters an atmosphere in which people feel at ease, valued, and
understood (Iszatt-White, 2009).
Emotional labor is enacted on two different levels. One of these
levels is strictly intrapersonal and involves self-regulation and
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FIGURE 1 | Theoretical model connecting gendered patterns of emotional labor with the prosocial use of power and its downstream consequences. Powerholder
gender is related to differences in the ability (path a) and the internal motivation (path b) to practice emotional labor, as well as in external emotional labor demands
(path c). These three factors directly contribute to emotional labor (paths d–f), which underlies the prosocial use of power (path g). Additionally, a stronger internal
motivation to practice emotional labor is associated with a more interdependent construal of power (path h), which influences the tendency to enact power in
prosocial ways (path i). The prosocial use of power has benefits for subordinates and organizations (path j), but it can also create costs for individual powerholders
(path k) and undermine gender equality in leadership roles (path l).
expression of the right kind and amount of emotion (Totterdell
and Holman, 2003;Hülsheger and Schewe, 2011). To achieve
this, individuals resort to one of two strategies: (a) a response-
focused emotion regulation strategy known as “surface acting,”
which entails the suppression of felt negative emotions through
the modification of facial displays (e.g., “putting on a smiley
face”); and (b) an antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategy
known as “deep acting” that involves changing inner feelings
through cognitive reappraisal—for example focusing on positive
rather than negative feelings (Hochschild, 1983;Grandey, 2000,
2003;Cheung and Tang, 2010). In addition to these intrapersonal
processes, emotional labor is enacted on an interpersonal level.
In order to respond adequately to the emotions of another
person, one must first identify how that person is feeling (Ashtar
et al., 2021). Thus, although an important part of the process
is self-oriented, emotional labor is inherently other-oriented
as it requires one to be attuned to others’ emotions and to
accommodate and cater to those emotions (i.e., paying attention
to, accurately recognizing, and responding effectively to the
feelings of others). Interpersonal and intrapersonal processes can
take place sequentially and repeat several times in the course of
a single interaction (e.g., identify another person’s feelings; self-
regulate one’s own emotions; produce the appropriate response;
identify the person’s reaction; recalibrate or maintain one’s
emotional expression, and so on).
When individuals practice emotional labor (e.g., by being
attentive to the emotional experience of others and by self-
regulating to respond to those emotions in a way that
facilitates organizational goals), such practices can manifest in an
interdependent and relational approach and in a wide variety of
behaviors. These behaviors, which essentially grease the wheels
of human interaction in organizational settings, can be classified
into three broad categories, including (a) acting in prosocial
rather than self-serving ways (e.g., being interpersonally helpful;
showing concern for others’ welfare at work; guiding, comforting,
and defending others); (b) being sensitive to others’ views (e.g.,
seeking out their opinion; allowing them to voice opposing
perspectives; accommodating others’ needs); and (c) maintaining
a positive emotional environment (e.g., making others feel at
ease and valued; tending to their morale; providing them with
emotional support).2
Antecedents of Emotional Labor: Ability
and Motivation
When considering the psychological antecedents of emotional
labor, it is important to distinguish between the ability to
practice it (Figure 1,path a) and the motivation to engage in it
(Figure 1,path b and path c). One may be skilled at practicing
emotional labor but not be particularly motivated to do so—
either generally or in a specific context. Alternatively, one may
desire to engage in emotional labor and fail miserably. This
distinction is key to understanding how emotional labor practices
relate to gender, as research suggests that women may be more
skilled at behaviors relevant to emotional labor than men as
well as more strongly motivated to practice them. Similarly, it
is crucial to distinguish between emotional labor that springs
from internal motivation (Figure 1,path b) and emotional labor
that is externally motivated (Figure 1,path c): Whether one
genuinely wishes to cater to others’ emotions (for instance, out of
an empathic concern for others; Batson, 1987, 2011), or whether
one feels an external demand to do so (e.g., due to formal work-
role requirements; Hochschild, 1983;Grandey, 2000;Cheung and
Tang, 2010).
These distinctions between ability, internal, and external
motivation form the basis of three different routes in our
theoretical model through which gender differences in emotional
labor result in women’s stronger prosocial use of power.
According to social role theory (Wood and Eagly, 2002;Eagly
and Wood, 2012), gender differences and similarities in social
behavior are the product of the disparate distribution of women
and men into distinct social roles. For instance, women occupy
2Emotional labor practices can be combined with the unique behavioral
affordances of high-power roles, manifesting in leadership styles that are more
interpersonally oriented, as we explain in the section on Emotional Labor at the
Top of the Hierarchy: Women’s Prosocial Use of Power.
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the great majority of care-oriented roles in society. Such
gendered distribution of labor, which is due in part to evolved
physical differences between women and men (e.g., in terms of
size, strength, reproductive activities), influences their behavior
through various processes, including the creation of gender roles.
These gender roles dictate different expectations for women and
men—for example, the kinds of psychological characteristics they
are believed to possess. Given that women tend to occupy care-
oriented roles, they are expected to possess the psychological
characteristics that are best suited to those roles, such as being
highly communal, kind, cooperative, etc. These expectations, as
well as the requirements of the specific roles that women and
men occupy, shape their social behavior (see Eagly et al., 2000)
via hormonal processes, socialization practices (i.e., how women
and men are taught to behave from a young age), and social
regulation (e.g., penalties and rewards for behaving in ways that
contradict or uphold expectations, respectively). As we discuss
below, gender differences have been identified in the ability,
internal motivation, and external demands to practice emotional
labor, which reflect the influence of gendered social roles (Wood
and Eagly, 2002;Eagly and Wood, 2012).
Gender Differences in Ability to Practice Emotional
Labor
Some evidence suggests that women may be more adept than
men at the intrapersonal processes entailed in emotional labor
practices, as they usually engage in a wider range of emotion
regulation strategies than men (Garnefski et al., 2004). For
instance, fMRI studies indicate that they use positive emotions in
the service of reappraising negative emotions to a greater degree
(McRae et al., 2008). With regards to the more interpersonal
aspects of emotional labor, studies indicate that women possess
better empathic accuracy than men—the ability to correctly infer
what another person is thinking or feeling (Ickes et al., 2000).
Women are also more successful than men at deciphering others’
non-verbal cues (La France et al., 2009;Williams et al., 2009), and
at recalling people’s non-verbal cues and facial expressions (Hall
et al., 2007). Other research has revealed that women score higher
than men on interpersonal aspects of emotional intelligence,
which involves the ability to perceive and express emotion and
regulate emotion in the self and others (Mayer et al., 1999),
including social skills such as being perceptive, empathic, and
adaptable (Argyle, 1994;Petrides and Furnham, 2000;Joseph and
Newman, 2010;Cabello et al., 2016).
In sum, empirical evidence indicates that women may be more
skilled than men at a host of behaviors that constitute the building
blocks of emotional labor. In line with social role theory (Wood
and Eagly, 2002;Eagly and Wood, 2012), these ability differences
may reflect women’s historical tendency to occupy positions in
which emotional skills are paramount (e.g., care-oriented roles).
As care-oriented roles promote and require emotional abilities,
such abilities may become entrenched into the female gender role
in a way that shapes women’s behavior (Eagly et al., 2000). For
instance, the socialization of young girls may place a stronger
emphasis than that of boys on the development of emotional
skills such as being able to identify and name emotions (McClure,
2000;Brody and Hall, 2010).
However, as alluded to earlier, an ability to practice emotional
labor successfully should not be confused with a motivation
to do so. This distinction becomes particularly important
when considering emotional labor practices that are externally
motivated (as discussed below), because ability and motivation
in this case may have opposite effects on well-being. Specifically,
whereas being more adept at managing emotions could make
emotional labor feel effortless, a strong external pressure to do
so may take a psychological toll, reducing emotional autonomy
and feelings of authenticity (Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002). We
discuss these burdens in detail in the section on The Downstream
Consequences of Women’s Prosocial Use of Power.
Gender Differences in Internal Motivation to Practice
Emotional Labor
Both internal (i.e., intrinsic) and external (i.e., extrinsic)
motivation to practice emotional labor to achieve organizational
goals may be stronger in women than in men. With regards
to internal motivation, women may genuinely have a stronger
proclivity than men to both consider and accommodate the
emotions of others. For example, women appear to care more
than men about correctly reading and responding to others’
emotions (Ickes et al., 2000;Klein and Hodges, 2001). Women are
also generally more likely than men to engage in the kinds of non-
verbal behaviors that facilitate social interaction (for a review, see
LaFrance and Vial, 2016), such as smiling (LaFrance et al., 2003),
maintaining eye contact (Hall, 1984); keeping closer physical
proximity (Hall and Gunnery, 2013); orienting their body more
directly toward their interaction partners (Helweg-Larsen et al.,
2004); employing affiliative speech, or language that affirms and
shows support to the other person (Leaper and Ayres, 2007); and
using back-channel responses (e.g., head nodding) to signal that
they are listening (Leaper and Robnett, 2011). Other research
suggests that women (but not men) may generally internalize
prosocial rather than self-interested behavior as their intuitive
response to other people (Rand et al., 2016).
As discussed in the previous sections when describing the
basic tenets of social role theory (Wood and Eagly, 2002;Eagly
and Wood, 2012), although the origins of these gender differences
are likely multiply determined, one clear source can be found in
different socialization practices that, from a young age, encourage
girls more so than boys to cultivate communal attributes (Brody,
1993;Hibbard and Buhrmester, 1998;Shields, 2002;Chaplin
et al., 2005). Women consistently report a stronger communal
self-concept than men, viewing themselves as friendlier, less
selfish, and more concerned with others (e.g., Witt and Wood,
2010;Hsu et al., 2021). Thus, the evidence indicates that women
are more highly internally motivated than men to practice
emotional labor.
Gender Differences in External Emotional Labor
Demands
In addition to having stronger internal motivation, women may
also experience stronger external pressures than men to get
emotional labor right. Whereas some individuals may be more
adept at emotional labor than others and/or personally more
inclined to practice it, organizational norms often impinge on
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people’s ability to express their emotions freely. Indeed, one
strong antecedent to emotional labor is the extent to which
there are contextual pressures that create a sense of obligation to
practice it, or emotional labor demands. Organizational contexts
and roles vary in how much emotional labor they require.
Women are generally more likely than men to hold jobs
entailing high work-role demands to display positive emotions
either to customers and clients or to coworkers and superiors
(Guy and Newman, 2004;Cortes and Pan, 2018). In many
female-dominated (i.e., “pink collar”) occupations, workers are
expected to employ emotional skills to bring about organizational
ends, whereas workers in male-dominated occupations do not
face these demands (Meier et al., 2006;Johnson and Spector,
2007;Nixon, 2009). Indeed, the concept of emotional labor
was originally developed by Hochschild (1983) to describe
the experience of low-level service jobs (e.g., flight attendants,
customer-oriented roles), which do not offer much opportunity
for advancement up the organizational hierarchy, and which
continue to be occupied primarily by women (U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics, 2021).
Importantly, not only are women more likely than men to
work in occupations with strong emotional labor demands; they
are also more likely than men to encounter pressures to practice
emotional labor even when occupying the same organizational
roles (e.g., Schaubroeck and Jones, 2000). From the perspective
of social role theory (Wood and Eagly, 2002;Eagly and Wood,
2012), cultural gender stereotypes develop from observation of
the historical distribution of women and men into different
social roles, leading people to expect and require women to
accommodate others’ needs and emotions to a greater extent
than men. Indeed, there is a strong belief that women, more so
than men, tend to care about and be sensitive to the feelings of
other people (Prentice and Carranza, 2002;White and Gardner,
2009;Haines et al., 2016). Stereotypes around emotion expression
in particular portray women as well-suited to comply with
emotional display rules that require gauging and responding to
others’ emotions (Lopez-Zafra and Gartzia, 2014) and expressing
positivity and interpersonal sensitivity (Shields, 2002;Timmers
et al., 2003;Fischbach et al., 2015). People tend to implicitly
associate the expression of anger with men (Bijlstra et al., 2010;
Neel et al., 2012;Smith et al., 2015); indeed, men are commonly
stereotyped as aggressive or violent (Leach et al., 2017) and as
more likely than women to display negative emotions such as
anger and hostility (Plant et al., 2000;Shields, 2000)—behaviors
that are incompatible with emotional labor practices.
Gender stereotypes have a strong prescriptive component
(Burgess and Borgida, 1999;Prentice and Carranza, 2002). Thus,
people typically think that women should be caring, kind, and
careful with others’ emotions. They do not require the same of
men, who are held to a lower communality standard in general
(Biernat and Manis, 1994; see also Vial and Cimpian, 2020,
for a review of shifting gender standards and social rewards).
Unsurprisingly, then, women are judged in relation to a higher
standard than men with respect to performing emotional labor
at work. For example, an experiment showed that women do not
reap any special rewards for being interpersonally helpful with
coworkers, whereas men receive accolades for the same behavior
(Heilman and Chen, 2005; see also Farrell and Finkelstein, 2007).
Women are expected to show positive emotions in general more
than men (Hess et al., 2005) and their emotional expression
at work is scrutinized more closely (Smith et al., 2016). In
contrast, men’s emotional expression is judged based on a relaxed
standard: Whereas women elicit penalties from other people
when they express anger in a professional context and their anger
is viewed as unjustified, men’s anger in the same context is seen as
acceptable and warranted (Brescoll and Uhlmann, 2008;Barrett
and Bliss-Moreau, 2009; see also Raymondie and Steiner, 2021).
In sum, even in the same organizational role, women encounter
stronger external pressures than men to practice emotional labor,
and are punished when they do not heed them—even when
they occupy high-power roles (as we elaborate on the section
on The Pressure Route: Emotional Labor Demands Curb Women’s
Self-Interested Use of Power).
EMOTIONAL LABOR AT THE TOP OF
THE HIERARCHY: WOMEN’S
PROSOCIAL USE OF POWER
Individuals practice emotional labor at all levels of the
organizational hierarchy. Whereas, in its origins, the concept of
emotional labor was focused on workers at lower hierarchical
levels (Hochschild, 1983), those at the top of the hierarchy also
practice emotional labor—identifying others’ emotions and self-
regulating their own in order to produce the kind of response that
may best achieve their organizational goals. Indeed, emotional
labor can be an important part of leadership (e.g., Gardner et al.,
2009;Humphrey, 2012). This may be particularly the case for
management roles embedded in occupational contexts that have
a strong care orientation (e.g., healthcare, early education) in
which communal attributes and the capacity to nurture others
are viewed as more typical in leaders (Yoder, 2001;Cowgill and
Vial, 2022). Unsurprisingly, women are better represented in
leadership positions in these organizational contexts compared to
non-care-oriented occupations (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
2021).
Emotional Labor at the Top Translates
Into Prosocial Use of Power
Given the unique behavioral affordances of high-level roles
(e.g., the prerogative to impose authority over others;
Magee and Frasier, 2014), we argue that emotional labor in
these roles translates into a more prosocial use of power.
By “prosocial use of power,” we mean a broad range of
actions intended to benefit people in the organizational
context other than the powerholder (i.e., behaviors such as
helping, comforting, sharing, cooperation, etc.; Batson, 2012),
which are supported by emotional labor practices that allow
for the accurate detection and accommodation of others’
emotional needs. Prosocial attitudes and behaviors are generally
valued as key features of effective leaders (e.g., Gerzema and
D’Antonio, 2013, 2017;Gartzia and van Knippenberg, 2016).
Indeed, promoting cooperative relationships with and among
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followers is often highlighted as an important leader function
(De Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2002).
At the top of the hierarchy, emotional labor practices may
translate into a leadership style that is more interpersonally
oriented, one that draws less on dominance to influence others
and, as a result, increases positive interpersonal behaviors among
subordinates (Humphrey, 2012;Kakkar and Sivanathan, 2021).
Emotional labor practices among managers and supervisors
manifest in prosocial behaviors toward employees (e.g., helping
and doing favors for subordinates), showing sensitivity to
their views (e.g., not dominating a team interaction; listening
and taking subordinates’ concerns into account when making
decisions), and seeking to foster a positive, friendly work
environment that is psychologically safe (e.g., avoid expressing
anger or being too critical or too dominant; showing empathy;
promoting cooperative relationships with and among followers).
At the same time, those with decision-making power are often
expected to self-regulate in order to maintain emotions at
bay and keep a cool head to make decisions rationally—for
example, to suppress feelings of empathy evoked by a specific
individual in order to maximize aggregate outcomes for the
group or organization they lead (e.g., Uhlmann et al., 2013).
Thus, powerholders’ effective emotional labor practices entail
walking a fine line between showing sensitivity and empathy
and being accommodating, while at the same time not letting
emotions cloud their judgment. These actions require those in
high-power roles to carefully read others’ emotions and manage
their own—often involving substantial self-regulation—in the
service of effective communication and producing the right state
of mind in others (i.e., emotional labor; Humphrey, 2012). All of
these practices appear to be more common among high-power
women compared to high-power men, as we describe next.
Women Wield Power in More Prosocial
Ways Than Men
Whether due to a stronger ability (e.g., Garnefski et al., 2004),
internal motivation (e.g., Ickes et al., 2000), or external demand
(e.g., Heilman and Chen, 2005), we argue that women’s greater
likelihood to practice emotional labor results in a more prosocial
use of power when they wield it compared to men (Figure 1,
path g). Powerholders who engage in emotional labor practices
are often described as transformational leaders (Wolfram and
Mohr, 2010;Vinkenburg et al., 2011) or as servant leaders
(Barbuto and Gifford, 2010;Lemoine and Blum, 2021), who
enact a communally oriented leadership style in which individual
consideration (“seeing” and nurturing followers) is key. Research
has consistently found that women are more likely than men to
adopt these kinds of interpersonally oriented leadership styles
(Eagly and Johnson, 1990;Eagly and Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001).
For example, an early study revealed that women showed more
concern for others than men even when they occupied high-
status organizational roles (Moskowitz et al., 1994). Meta-analytic
evidence indicates that women in positions of authority are more
likely than men in those positions to prioritize the maintenance
of interpersonal relationships, to tend to the morale and welfare
of others, or to show consideration for others—e.g., helping
and doing favors for subordinates (van Engen and Willemsen,
2004). Other work suggests that women (but not men) in high-
power roles are sensitive to other people’s views and perspectives,
and less likely to dominate team interactions (Brescoll, 2011).
Further supporting these trends, a study commissioned by
LeanIn.org and McKinsey and Company (Thomas et al., 2021),
which included responses from over 65,000 employees in 423
companies in the United States and Canada, revealed that female
managers were more likely than male managers to provide
emotional support to employees and to help them navigate work-
life challenges. In the context of academia, surveys have found
that female faculty perform significantly more uncompensated
internal service than male faculty, acquiescing to participate in
committee-work more often, even when controlling for rank (i.e.,
tenure; Guarino and Borden, 2017).
Thus, the existing evidence indicates that women behave
in more prosocial ways than men when they have power.
Nevertheless, it would be helpful for future investigations to
examine this possibility more directly as well as the connection
with emotional labor practices. Studies may test whether gender
differences in emotion self-regulation among male and female
powerholders predicts the latter’s stronger tendency to behave
prosocially. Emotion regulation takes time and effortful control
(Grandey, 2000); thus, studies could examine whether gender
differences in powerholders’ prosocial behavior are eliminated in
conditions that might impair emotional labor (e.g., under time
constraints or cognitive load). Given that women are more skilled
at emotional labor than men (Ickes et al., 2000;Garnefski et al.,
2004;McRae et al., 2008;Cabello et al., 2016), future studies could
also examine whether female powerholders respond better than
male powerholders to emotional labor demands.
Multiple Routes to Gender Differences in
the Prosocial Use of Power
We propose that gender differences in the ability (e.g., Garnefski
et al., 2004), internal motivation (e.g., Ickes et al., 2000), and
external demands (e.g., Heilman and Chen, 2005) to practice
emotional labor constitute three distinct pathways or routes
through which gendered emotional labor practices and demands
result in gender differences in the prosocial use of power. Of
these three routes, the “ability” route (Figure 1,paths a, d, and
g) is the most straightforward, as we describe below. We also
propose that there are two other routes connecting gendered
emotional labor practices with the prosocial use of power, which
are less obvious but equally (or perhaps even more) influential:
a “construal” route (Figure 1,paths b, h, and i) and a “pressure”
route (Figure 1,paths c, f, and g).
The Ability Route: Women’s Greater Aptitude for
Emotional Labor Facilitates the Prosocial Use of
Power
The ability route focuses on gender differences in the ability
to practice emotional labor (Figure 1,path a), as previously
discussed (Ickes et al., 2000;Garnefski et al., 2004;McRae
et al., 2008;Cabello et al., 2016). Such differences in ability
may logically underlie gender differences in actual emotional
labor (Figure 1,path d). Specifically, women’s greater aptitude
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for the skills involved in emotional labor relative to men
would enable them to practice it, thereby directly influencing
women’s prosocial use of power (Figure 1,path g). Women’s
superior ability to accurately understand what others are feeling
(Ickes et al., 2000) and read their non-verbal expressions (La
France et al., 2009;Williams et al., 2009) would make it easier
for them to subsequently accommodate their needs (e.g., to
display the kind of individualized consideration that is central
to transformational leadership styles; Eagly and Johnson, 1990;
Eagly and Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001). Supporting this view,
studies have found that the ability to perceive and respond to
others’ emotions is positively related to behaving altruistically
toward others (Charbonneau and Nicol, 2002). Thus, women
may use power more benevolently than men simply because they
are better equipped to practice emotional labor.
The Construal Route: Women’s Greater Internal
Motivation to Practice Emotional Labor Translates
Into a More Benevolent View (and Use) of Power
In addition to directly promoting prosocial behavior by
increasing the amount of emotional labor practiced (Figure 1,
paths b, e and g), we propose that women’s stronger internal
motivation than men to perform emotional labor may foster
prosocial behavior indirectly through a “construal” route: Due to
their internal motivation to practice emotional labor (Figure 1,
path b), women construe power in a more interdependent way
than men (Figure 1,path h), which fosters a prosocial use of
power (Figure 1,path i). Beyond the objective degree of power
that a person may have (i.e., how much a person is actually in
control of their own and others’ fate), how a person construes
their power is fundamental to understanding how they wield it
(Sassenberg et al., 2014;Sturm and Antonakis, 2015;Tost and
Johnson, 2019;Foulk et al., 2020). Specifically, power appears
to magnify preexisting individual dispositions to be more self-
oriented or, conversely, more communally oriented (e.g., Côté
et al., 2011;Galinsky et al., 2016). Those with power are highly
attuned to features in their environment that can help them
achieve their goals (Keltner et al., 2003;Guinote, 2007, 2008),
including interpersonal and prosocial goals. When people feel
powerful, they are better able to connect with and enact their true
selves (Kraus et al., 2011;Kifer et al., 2013). Some may approach
power in a more “personalized” way that highlights autonomy
and dominance over others, whereas some may approach power
in a more “socialized” manner that highlights the powerholder’s
responsibility to ensure the best possible outcomes for the group
at large (Frieze and Boneva, 2001; see also Wang and Sun, 2016).
Prosocial effects ensue when powerholders construe their
power in interdependent ways that highlight responsibility
for the welfare of others (Overbeck and Park, 2006;Gordon
and Chen, 2013;De Wit et al., 2017). When people hold a
more interdependent self-construal, they use power benevolently
(Howard et al., 2007), and when they have a stronger other-
orientation they tend to be fairer in their dealings with others
(Blader and Chen, 2012). Powerholders with a stronger need
to belong or be accepted tend to downplay their power and
yield to the opinions and views of other people (Rios et al.,
2015). Other work has shown that power can sometimes increase
perspective-taking (Hall et al., 2005, 2007;Schmid Mast et al.,
2009). The more the powerholder understands the high-power
position as empathic and other-oriented, the more he or she is
interpersonally sensitive (Chen et al., 2001;Schmid Mast et al.,
2009;Côté et al., 2011;Chin et al., 2013). If the psychological
experience of power leads powerholders to behave more in
line with their other-oriented or self-oriented dispositions (e.g.,
Kraus et al., 2011;Foulk et al., 2020), then it is possible
that baseline gender differences in the internal motivation to
perform emotional labor may persist even when men and women
occupy positions of power, and women’s propensity to act on
such motivation may be enhanced. Indeed, recent investigations
provide indirect evidence in line with the idea that women
may think of people at the top of the hierarchy as being
particularly adept at managing others’ emotions—that they may
view emotional labor as central to power and leadership (e.g.,
Vecchio and Boatwright, 2002;Bellou, 2011;Hays, 2013;Collins
et al., 2014;Gino et al., 2015).
First, given that power facilitates goal pursuit (Keltner et al.,
2003;Guinote, 2007, 2008), women’s stronger communal goals
(Diekman et al., 2011) and internal motivation to practice
emotional labor may translate into a more prosocial use of power
in alignment with those goals, whereas men’s more agentic goals
may result in strong self-oriented behavior. Due to their strong
emphasis on connection, interpersonal sensitivity, and the overall
tendency to see oneself in a relational manner (Josephs et al.,
1992;Cross and Madson, 1997;Witt and Wood, 2010;Hsu
et al., 2021), women who acquire power may be overall more
attuned to the needs and emotions of others, and willing and
emboldened to cater to them. Compared to women, men in
power may be more content with the possession of the means to
dominate or impose their will onto others (i.e., “being feared”;
Hays, 2013), as they generally have a more independent self-
construal (Guimond et al., 2006) and tend to self-describe as more
dominant and assertive (Prentice and Carranza, 2002;Hentschel
et al., 2019). For example, in a series of studies, Gino et al.
(2015) found that men were more likely than women to desire a
highly dominant type of power, “to have an impact on, control or
manage other people, influence other people, or control resources
others depend on” (Gino et al., 2015).
Second, women appear to have stronger expectations than
men for emotional labor in authority figures, which may
mirror their differential approach to wielding power when they
have it themselves. To illustrate, a meta-analysis of 69 studies
drawing from three different research paradigms testing gender
stereotypical perceptions of leaders and authority figures revealed
that men tend to construe leadership as more agentic and
less communal than women (Koenig et al., 2011). Women
more than men tend to view arrogance or being controlling
as undesirable characteristics of those in powerful roles, and
instead value communal, positive emotional attributes in leaders
(Vial and Napier, 2018). Other research has similarly revealed
that, compared to men, women expect leaders to be more
“people-oriented” (Bellou, 2011) and more relational (Boatwright
and Forrest, 2000), and react more positively to leaders who
behave more communally (Collins et al., 2014) and who show
considerateness toward others (Vecchio and Boatwright, 2002).
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Thus, women more than men appear to envision the ideal
powerful person as someone who is able to relate in a positive
emotional manner to other people and to accommodate their
feelings and interests; namely, someone who performs emotional
labor. This vision may influence how women themselves
wield power, leading to more prosocial behavior in female
powerholders than in male powerholders.
The Pressure Route: Emotional Labor Demands Curb
Women’s Self-Interested Use of Power
Finally, the third and last route is a “pressure” route such that,
to some extent, observed gender differences in the prosocial use
of power reflect subtly coercive emotional labor demands and
looming social threats that impinge on women more strongly
than on men (Figure 1,path c). Specifically, we propose that,
although attaining structural power could free individuals to
behave in more self-serving ways (Kipnis, 1972;Keltner et al.,
2003;Van Kleef et al., 2008), the stronger emotional labor
demands imposed on women compared to men (e.g., Heilman
and Chen, 2005;Brescoll and Uhlmann, 2008;Barrett and Bliss-
Moreau, 2009) do not cease as they accrue power. These demands
may effectively constrain powerful women’s (but not men’s)
ability to exercise their authority in self-serving ways, resulting
in more prosocial power use.
Women in top roles are often expected to be more emotionally
available and more sensitive to others than men in similar
roles. For example, Schaubroeck and Jones (2000) showed that,
within the same large organization, women perceived a stronger
requirement to express positive emotions relative to men, even
when position tenure and salary level were kept constant
(see also Bellas, 1999). In another study, participants expected
female leaders to be particularly more effective than male
leaders at “caretaking” leader behaviors such as encouraging,
assisting, praising, mentoring, and providing resources to others
(Prime et al., 2009). Comparable expectations of caretaking
and nurturing behaviors have been documented in the realm
of academia, where female professors are subject to stronger
emotional labor demands from students than male professors
(e.g., to do special favors; El-Alayli et al., 2018). Women
more than men are expected to adopt a communally oriented
style of leadership focused on nurturing followers that involves
listening, showing empathy, and providing emotional support to
subordinates, commonly known as “servant leadership” (Barbuto
and Gifford, 2010;Lemoine and Blum, 2021). Similarly, people
expect women more than men to lead in a “transformational”
way (Embry et al., 2008;Vinkenburg et al., 2011;Stempel et al.,
2015), a leadership style that includes a strong component of
consideration and support for subordinates’ needs, preferences,
and welfare, and the creation of a friendly work environment
that is psychologically safe (Rafferty and Griffin, 2004). At a basic
cognitive level, research indicates that people expect feminine-
faced leaders to be cooperative and display a prosocial leadership
style based on altruism, empathy, and reciprocity, whereas
they expect masculine-faced leaders to display a dominant style
(Spisak et al., 2012).
Expectations that female leaders perform more emotional
labor translate into an unspoken requirement that they should do
so: In order to be seen as effective leaders, women (but not men)
must be interpersonally sensitive—sympathetic, compassionate,
understanding, forgiving, helpful. These demands to wield power
“with a velvet glove” become sharply apparent in the backlash
(i.e., social and economic penalties; Rudman, 1998) that high-
power women encounter when they do not accommodate or
spare others’ feelings. A plethora of studies following role
congruity theory (Eagly and Karau, 2002) have demonstrated that
female leaders are evaluated negatively when they enact their
role in dominant ways—for instance, when they discipline or
give negative feedback to subordinates (Sinclair and Kunda, 2000;
Atwater et al., 2001;Brett et al., 2005) or when they demand a
behavior change in others (Williams and Tiedens, 2016). These
dominant behaviors, which are antithetical to emotional labor,
lead to a perceived “communality deficit” in female leaders
(Heilman and Okimoto, 2007; see also Ma et al., 2022), causing
them to be seen as cold and interpersonally hostile (Heilman
and Okimoto, 2007). Women (but not men) who lead with a
directive style are more likely to receive negative evaluations than
women who lead with a democratic style (Eagly et al., 1992),
and abusive leadership tends to be penalized more harshly in
female than in male leaders (Kim et al., 2021). When emotional
labor is not readily apparent in leaders, those leaders fare worse
if they are women.
The demands placed on female leaders focus strongly on the
intrapersonal emotional labor aspect of deamplifying emotion—
taming the expression of intense emotions (Matsumoto et al.,
2005;Moran et al., 2013). Although research indicates that
women and men report feeling most emotions to the same
degree (Barrett et al., 1998;Else-Quest et al., 2012), women are
stereotyped as too emotional and overly sensitive (Fischer, 1993;
Shields, 2013;Dolan, 2014), and therefore unable to keep a cool
head to make decisions rationally (e.g., Citrin and Roberts, 2004;
see Brescoll, 2016, for a review). Thus, the emotional makeup of
women is viewed as incompatible with some of the intrapersonal
emotional labor requirements of high-level positions (Fischbach
et al., 2015), leading to close scrutiny of female powerholders’
emotional expression. For example, women in top positions
elicit more negative evaluations than men in similar roles for
expressing anger (Lewis, 2000;Timmers et al., 2003;Brescoll and
Uhlmann, 2008), a highly dominant emotion that is typically off
limits for low-power individuals (Plant et al., 2000;Tiedens et al.,
2000;Petkanopoulou et al., 2019) as well as powerful women (but
tends to be condoned in high-power men). But the demand on
powerful women to deamplify emotion for the benefit of others
does not only target negative emotions, but all emotions more
generally (for reviews, see Brescoll, 2016;Smith et al., 2016). As
a result, women in high places walk a fine line, risking backlash
from others if they fail to get emotional labor “just right.”
Research further suggests that performing emotional labor
may allow women to successfully ascend the organizational
hierarchy, eschewing the negative reactions they often encounter
when they behave in explicitly dominant ways (Williams and
Tiedens, 2016). For instance, some studies indicate that women
reap more benefits than men from enacting transformational
leadership practices, such that the teams they lead perform better
(Chen and Shao, 2022). Men are held to a lower standard in
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this regard, as evidenced by research showing that men who
practice transformational leadership tend to be evaluated as
more promotable than women (Hentschel et al., 2018). These
findings highlight the persistence of an impression management
conundrum for women in top positions (Phelan and Rudman,
2010), and suggest the possibility that emotional labor practices
may help women navigate these hurdles. Indeed, to lead and
influence others without seeming overly domineering, women in
powerful roles usually tame the way they express their power (e.g.,
Amanatullah and Morris, 2010;Moss-Racusin and Rudman,
2010;Brescoll, 2011;Amanatullah and Tinsley, 2013). Practicing
emotional labor as an impression management strategy may
result in a more prosocial use of power overall.
THE DOWNSTREAM CONSEQUENCES
OF WOMEN’S PROSOCIAL USE OF
POWER
Women’s higher likelihood than men of engaging in prosocial
behaviors when they occupy high-power roles has important
consequences on many levels: for individual women, for
subordinates who report to female authorities, and for
organizations and society as a whole. The positive effects of
women’s more prosocial use of power tend to benefit other
people: Those who report to or work directly for them, as well
as the organizations or groups in which women’s power is
embedded. Importantly, a focus on the emotional labor practices
that underlie prosocial behavior sheds light on the potential
negative effects of women’s prosocial use of power, which burden
individual women. We discuss these positive and negative
downstream consequences first; then, we articulate how powerful
women’s emotional labor practices may contribute to gender
inequality in organizational hierarchies.
The Positive Effects of Powerful
Women’s Prosocial Behavior
Women’s more prosocial use of power is likely to confer many
benefits for subordinates and organizations (Figure 1,path j).
When those in powerful positions are interpersonally sensitive,
subordinates directly reap the benefits—for example by being
able to influence the decision-making process (De Wit et al.,
2017). Organizations as a whole may benefit as well, as emotional
labor is central to some of the key aspects of transformational
leadership, like individualized consideration (Bass et al., 2003;
Byrne et al., 2014), and it could foster a more socially responsible
use of power (e.g., Chen et al., 2001). Similarly, in the context
of political power and leadership, research has found that
politicians’ tendency to practice emotional labor (for example, by
employing courteous speech and avoiding incivility in debates)
can be highly beneficial, reducing political polarization and
increasing trust in politicians (Skytte, 2021).
For these reasons, women’s higher tendency than men to
behave prosocially when they occupy high-power roles may
confer important advantages on the people they lead and the
organizations in which their power is embedded. Indeed, gender
differences in leadership effectiveness tend to favor women over
men (Eagly and Carli, 2003;Eagly et al., 2014;Offermann
and Foley, 2020). Employee well-being tends to be higher in
companies with more women in top positions (Thomas et al.,
2021), and teams led by women tend to report more cohesion
and cooperation (Post, 2015). Other research suggests that firms
with more women in high-power roles are less likely to face
discrimination lawsuits (Abebe and Dadanlar, 2021), have better
financial performance (Glass and Cook, 2018;Hoobler et al.,
2018), and engage in more socially responsible practices (e.g.,
Glass et al., 2016). In the political realm, a higher proportion
of women in parliaments is associated with lower levels of
corruption at the country level (Dollar et al., 2001;Swamy et al.,
2001;Rivas, 2013). Although some of these findings may rely
on observational data, raising the possibility of reverse causality,
they converge with experimental studies that suggest a causal
relationship. To illustrate, in a series of experiments, the mere
presence of a female leader relative to a male leader caused people
to anticipate fairer treatment within an organization and better
personal outcomes because they associated stronger communal
values in the organization when women occupied leadership
roles (Joshi and Diekman, 2021). Similarly, when a hypothetical
organization was in crisis, participants in two experiments were
more likely to trust the organization (e.g., be willing to invest in
it) when it was led by women than by men because they expected
women to be more skilled at interpersonal emotion management
(Post et al., 2019).
We argue that these advantages and benefits may stem
from female leaders’ greater tendency to use their power in
prosocial ways, and that male leaders (and the organizations that
they lead) would also generally benefit from practicing more
emotional labor. Regardless of their gender, powerholders who
practice emotional labor can foster an environment in which
employees and subordinates feel supported, are happier, and
perform better (Thomas et al., 2021). Thus, although our focus
in this article has been on the high standard for emotional
labor against which female leaders are judged compared to
male leaders (which is arguably unfair), perhaps a greater focus
should be placed on identifying ways of increasing emotional
labor among male leaders. Indeed, recent research indicates that
both male and female leaders can enhance their effectiveness
by enacting more communal behaviors that foster cooperation
and trust (e.g., Gartzia and van Knippenberg, 2016;Hentschel
et al., 2018;Gartzia and Baniandrés, 2019;Post et al., 2019).
As more women attain high-power roles, their tendency to
practice emotional labor might promote a shift in people’s
implicit notions of leadership toward valuing communality as
a central rather than peripheral aspect (Vial and Napier, 2018),
one equally expected and rewarded in all leaders regardless
of their gender.
The Negative Effects of Powerful
Women’s Prosocial Behavior
Whereas powerful women’s emotional labor tends to benefit
other people, we propose that practicing emotional labor also
entails costs for individual powerholders (Figure 1,path k).
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Although women may be socialized to practice emotional labor
more than men (Brody, 1993;Hibbard and Buhrmester, 1998;
Shields, 2002;Chaplin et al., 2005) and may come to develop
stronger emotional abilities than men (e.g., Ickes et al., 2000;
Cabello et al., 2016), they may still experience the added
external demand to practice emotional labor as a burden. If
women in power are interpersonally sensitive because they
genuinely care for others (i.e., due to an internal motivation
to behave in prosocial ways), then they might feel authentic
and experience a higher sense of well-being than when they
lack power (Kifer et al., 2013), due to an enhanced felt ability
to fulfill their communal goals (Keltner et al., 2003;Guinote,
2007, 2008;Diekman et al., 2011). However, to the extent
that women in power feel pressured to perform emotional
labor (i.e., when they do so to avoid penalties for behaving
too dominantly; Phelan and Rudman, 2010), emotional labor
may take a psychological toll and detract from their well-
being, making the exercise of power exhausting and emotionally
draining for women.
Caring for other people can be burdensome in general.
Other-oriented emotions such as empathy and compassion (i.e.,
the emotions that underlie prosocial behavior; Batson, 2011)
are cognitively costly and effortful, and people tend to avoid
feeling these emotions when given the chance (Cameron and
Payne, 2011;Cameron et al., 2019;Scheffer et al., 2021). More
specifically, research has documented how emotional labor can
be psychologically costly for those who practice it: The purposeful
self-control and the suppression of felt emotions that are often
involved in the more intrapersonal aspects of emotional labor
(Grandey, 2000) have been linked with intensified negative
feelings (Scott and Barnes, 2011); emotional dissonance (Hopp
et al., 2010); a reduced sense of authenticity (Brotheridge
and Grandey, 2002); impaired memory (Richards and Gross,
2000); diminished task performance (Hülsheger and Schewe,
2011); reduced job satisfaction (Judge et al., 2009;Cheung and
Tang, 2010); worsened mental health stemming from emotional
exhaustion, stress, and burnout (Grandey, 2000;Brotheridge and
Grandey, 2002;Beal et al., 2006;Johnson and Spector, 2007);
and physical illness, including high blood pressure and cancer
(Grandey, 2000;Johnson and Spector, 2007;Hopp et al., 2010).
As this litany suggests, if female powerholders perform more
emotional labor than their male counterparts, then they may also
fail to realize some of the benefits that power is supposed to
bestow on well-being (Kifer et al., 2013). Indeed, women leaders
are more likely to be exhausted and chronically stressed than men
in similar positions (Thomas et al., 2021). A recent study further
revealed that moving up in organizational rank was associated
with greater emotional benefits for men than for women—i.e.,
diminished negative feelings of frustration and discouragement
(Taylor et al., 2021). Other research indicates that, compared
to men, women anticipate a higher burden of responsibility
from attaining a high-power position as well as other negative
outcomes (e.g., stronger stress and anxiety; Gino et al., 2015). It is
possible that these negative effects may be countered by a sense of
fulfillment or personal reward when emotional labor is internally
motivated; however, if strong expectations for powerful women
to be prosocial create an added pressure for them to engage in
emotional labor, the evidence suggests that women will pay a
psychological and physical toll.
IMPLICATIONS FOR GENDER EQUALITY
AT THE TOP OF THE HIERARCHY
In addition to the potential negative costs for individual women
that we discussed in the previous section, emotional labor
practices can create an uneven playing field that can contribute
to gender inequality in organizational hierarchies (Figure 1,path
l). Women continue to be greatly underrepresented in high-
power roles (Eagly and Heilman, 2016;United Nations Women,
2021). Part of this underrepresentation is due to prejudice
against women who deviate from the traditional gender role
(Heilman and Eagly, 2008). For example, as mentioned earlier,
there is strong evidence that women in roles of authority face
more careful scrutiny than their male counterparts (Brescoll
and Uhlmann, 2008;Barrett and Bliss-Moreau, 2009). But in
addition to this prejudice, we argue that women’s stronger
internal motivation to practice emotional labor, as well as the
stronger external demands to do so that they experience relative
to men, may undermine their likelihood of actually attaining and
retaining power—helping maintain the unequal distribution of
men and women in leadership roles.
Channeling Women Toward Less
Prestigious Leader Roles
The internal motivation to do emotional labor and enact power
more prosocially may keep women from attaining the most
prestigious high-level positions. Indeed, women appear more
interested in high-power roles when the communal aspects of
leadership are emphasized (Schneider et al., 2016;Pate and Fox,
2018;Schneider and Bos, 2019), which makes leadership and
femininity appear more congruous (see also Henningsen et al.,
2021; and Hentschel et al., 2021). However, such communal
attributes are viewed as compatible with leadership primarily
in “female-typed” domains such as healthcare or education
rather than “male-typed” domains such as technology or finance
(Cowgill and Vial, 2022), which tend to be viewed as much more
prestigious and to be valued more (Block et al., 2018). Moreover,
emotional labor practices may hinder women’s advancement up
the management ladder, getting them stuck in mid-levels (e.g.,
International Labour Office, Bureau for Employers’ Activities,
2019;Einarsdottir et al., 2018). Emotional labor and prosocial
work take up leaders’ finite time and energy resources, but
are often “invisible” and not usually rewarded in formal ways
in organizational contexts (Steinberg, 1999;Guy and Newman,
2004;Bolino and Grant, 2016). Relational service work in
academia (e.g., mentoring or doing special favors for students),
which female faculty tend to perform at higher rates than male
faculty (Tunguz, 2016;Guarino and Borden, 2017;Hanasono
et al., 2018;Berheide et al., 2022), is a chief example of the
draining effects of such (invisible) emotional labor: Such work
takes limited time away from other activities (e.g., research)
that are valued much more highly in promotion and tenure
decisions. Indeed, experiments show that women are more likely
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to volunteer for, be asked to perform, and accept requests
to do “low-promotability” tasks that benefit organizations but
are unlikely to impact career advancement into more senior
leadership roles (Babcock et al., 2017). Thus, emotional labor
practices may promote gender segregation within leadership,
feeding a two-tier system in which male managers are at the top
and female managers are at the bottom.
Discouraging Women From Pursuing Top
Roles
By making the psychological experience of power overall less
appealing for women, the stronger emotional labor demands that
women face could discourage them from pursuing high-power
roles, ultimately maintaining male dominance in these roles.
Again, the difference between internal and external motivation
becomes crucial to understanding this nuanced distinction:
Whereas women may be intrinsically drawn to high-power
roles in contexts that favor communal behavior (Schneider
et al., 2016;Pate and Fox, 2018;Schneider and Bos, 2019),
they may nevertheless resent the strong external pressure to
practice emotional labor around the clock. Research suggests
that power is most appealing when it is construed in terms
of personal opportunities, and less so when it is construed in
terms of responsibility toward others (Sassenberg et al., 2014).
If women, relative to men, construe power in a way that entails
less autonomy and more responsibility for others, and if women
in power experience stronger demands to toe a fine emotional
line when dealing with others, these added burdens may partly
explain why women are less interested than men in high-power
roles. Women may see power as more of a “chore” than men—
and rightly so, based on what can be gleaned from the literature
on women’s experiences with high power roles (e.g., Brescoll,
2016;Thomas et al., 2021). Power, saddled by strict emotional
labor demands, may not be an attractive prospect.
Pushing Women to Opt Out of
High-Power Roles
In addition to making power less appealing to women or guiding
women toward less prestigious high-level roles, emotional labor
can further undermine gender equality by making it difficult for
women to retain their power. Even when they attain a high-
power role, emotional labor makes exercising that power more
exhausting and personally draining for women than for men,
which may encourage them to give up or opt out of these roles.
As reviewed earlier, emotional labor is costly both psychologically
(Richards and Gross, 2000;Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002;
Beal et al., 2006;Hopp et al., 2010;Scott and Barnes, 2011)
and physically (Grandey, 2000;Johnson and Spector, 2007;
Hopp et al., 2010), and has a negative impact on work-related
outcomes such as performance and job satisfaction (Judge
et al., 2009;Cheung and Tang, 2010;Hülsheger and Schewe,
2011). Qualitative studies have revealed that the difficult task
of expressing one’s authentic self while acquiescing to external
expectations to perform emotional labor may drive women to opt
out of leadership positions (Frkal and Criscione-Naylor, 2020).
Additional research is needed to provide quantitative data to
support these findings and to further examine the mechanisms
through which emotional labor demands push women out of
high-power roles, promoting gender segregation at the top
of organizations.
Making Women’s Power More Precarious
Beyond the possibility that emotional labor demands may
push women out of high-power roles, practicing emotional
labor could make power more precarious, putting women at
risk of losing it. One reason why women with power cannot
simply ignore emotional labor demands from others is that
the legitimacy of their power—the extent to which others feel
that women deserve to be heeded as authorities—is usually in
question (Vial et al., 2016). Even when they occupy a formal
position in an organizational hierarchy that confers them with
structural power and control over resources, it is more difficult
for female authority figures than it is for men in the same
positions to elicit status (i.e., respect, admiration, acceptance
from others; Magee and Frasier, 2014). These status attributions
are key to imbuing power with the kind of legitimacy that
fosters cooperation from subordinates and followers (Tyler, 2002,
2006;Levi et al., 2009;Magee and Frasier, 2014). For female
powerholders, foregoing emotional labor seems like a steadfast
way to lose legitimacy in the eyes of others and, in turn, to
be undermined and questioned (Butler and Geis, 1990;Koch,
2005).
Additionally, emotional labor demands may create a catch-
22 for women. When they heed such demands, women may
run the risk of having their power contested by being seen as
inauthentic (Gardner et al., 2009) or too tentative (Forsyth et al.,
1997;Bongiorno et al., 2014;Nandkeolyar et al., 2022). The
strong communality implicitly conveyed by emotional labor may
be seen as more suitable for the follower role than the leader
role (Braun et al., 2017). Thus, women in high-power roles who
engage in emotional labor may sometimes lose credibility as
leaders, especially among male subordinates (Embry et al., 2008;
Bongiorno et al., 2014) who have a stronger preference than
female subordinates for dominant leaders (Koenig et al., 2011;
Vial and Napier, 2018), and who overall appear less supportive of
female leaders (e.g., Netchaeva et al., 2015;Vial et al., 2018). These
inequalities in leader support contribute to gender segregation at
the top of organizations.
Finally, expectations that women will practice emotional labor
to a higher extent when they become leaders may result in
them being appointed to highly precarious high-power roles—
a phenomenon known as the “Glass Cliff” (Ryan and Haslam,
2005, 2007;Glass and Cook, 2016;Morgenroth et al., 2020).
Emotional labor (e.g., responding to and managing others’
negative emotions) and a prosocial use of power (i.e., an
interpersonally oriented leadership style) may be particularly
relevant in crisis situations, making people more likely to support
and promote women into high-level roles that are risky and
uncertain (Ryan et al., 2011;Gartzia et al., 2012). These precarious
appointments, however, can set female leaders up for failure—
which may subsequently negatively impact the prospects of other
aspiring women leaders. For example, Manzi and Heilman (2021)
showed in a series of experiments that participants were less likely
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 11 August 2022 | Volume 13 | Article 849566