A review of the literature on emotional labor based on CiteSpace visualization

Abstract

Emotional labor plays a crucial role in modern service industries, serving as the core factor driving customer satisfaction, employee well-being, and long-term corporate competitiveness. While research on emotional labor has made some progress, issues such as vague research subjects, lack of generalizable situational analysis, fragmented findings, and insufficient systematic organization remain. This paper selects two widely representative databases, Web of Science (WOS), to systematically review and conduct bibliometric analysis of 2,392target doc-uments using CiteSpace software. It reconstructs the literature from both cogni-tive regulation and affective management perspectives, revealing the current state of research on emotional labor. The study finds that the antecedents of emotional labor involve four dimensions: individual, organizational, customer, and socio-cultural. Its outcomes have profound impacts on employees, organi-zations, and customers. The research on emotional labor presents three levels of exploration: dimensions, specific manifestations, and situational contexts. After reviewing the outcome variables and influencing factors at each level, it inte-grates an integrated analysis framework for emotional labor, explores its dy-namic evolution and feedback loop mechanisms, and summarizes the short-comings of existing research. Based on this, it discusses future research direc-tions. This paper approaches from the dual perspectives of cognitive regulation and emotion management, revealing research blind spots through Citespace visualization. By employing multi-level research threads such as keyword clus-tering, co-occurrence analysis, and time series analysis, it systematically re-views previously scattered related studies, providing scientific evidence for management. This promotes employee well-being and organizational develop-ment, offers pathways for theoretical integration and practical optimization.