Cross-Cultural Emotional Labor: A Study of NGO Workers in Haiti

ABSTRACT

Although demand for emotional labor (EL) is at its highest in times of disasters, there is a lack of studies on EL by disaster response and recovery workers in intercultural contexts. Using in-depth interviews and secondary data collected in Haiti, this article focuses on the link between culture and EL. We find that an understanding of the cultural context and the cultural competencies used to effectively navigate that context are central to each step of effective emotional labor performance. These findings help disaster response organizations better understand the value of cultural competence and how it effects the performance of EL.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster
• emotional labor
• culture
• international aid

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In addition to these two themes, there is an emerging public administration literature which examines the link between emotional labor and public sector motivation (PSM) (Hsieh et al., 2012).

2. Although a survey was collected for both studies, those results are not included here as their focus was not on the cultural aspects of emotional labor.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [3P20MD002288-04S1]; Florida International University Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center.