A research on tour guides’ use of emotional labor and the relationship between their job satisfaction and burnout levels: the sample of İzmir

In today’s highly competitive business environment, employees are expected to display positive attitudes and emotions as it affects the service quality and volume of business of a company. In hospitality industry, where customer employee encounter is occured intensely, comprehension of emotional labor is significant as it is directly related with employees’ well being and performance. Emotional labor is defined as employee’s ability to conform their outward behavior to display the appropriate emotions for a wage and the job nature of tour leaders demand a high degree of emotional labor. Tour guiding is considered to be one of the most attractive jobs by many people but it is not the case in real life for them being front-line employees who are in face-to-face interaction with customers all the time. Most of the time they have to examine the group’s expectations and behave in a manner to match these expectations to complete the tour with satisfied guests. So they cannot always express their felt emotions with ‘Customer is always right’ rule in their minds. Tour guiding as one component of the tourism product is subject to emotional labor and the purpose of this research is to identify the use of emotional labor and impact of it on tour guide’s levels of job satisfaction and burnout. The research is carried out on tour guides who are active members of İZRO. The study is divided into four sections. The first two sections are related to tour guiding and emotions and emotional labor. In the third section, the outcomes of the EL in terms of job satisfaction and burnout is explained and lastly the analysis of data is followed by a discussion of the findings and recommendations.