Every employee expends physical and mental labor by putting body and mind, respectively, into the job. But jobs also require emotional labor, an employee’s expression of organizationally desired emotions. Emotional labor is a key component of effective job performance. Your managers expect you to be courteous, not hostile, in your interactions with coworkers.

The way we experience an emotion is obviously not always the same as the way we show it. To analyze emotional labor, we divide emotions into felt or displayed emotions. Felt emotions are our actual emotions. In contrast, displayed emotions are those the organization requires workers to show and considers appropriate in a given job. They’re not innate; they’re learned, and they may or may not coincide with felt emotions.

Effective managers have learned to look serious when they give an employee a negative performance evaluation, and to look calm when they are berated by their bosses, because the organization expects these displays. Displaying fake emotions requires us to suppress real ones. Surface acting is hiding feelings and emotional expressions in response to display rules. A worker who smiles at a customer even when he doesn’t feel like it is surface acting.

Displaying emotions we don’t really feel can be exhausting. Surface acting is associated with increased stress and decreased job satisfaction. Long-term emotional dissonance is a predictor for burnout, declines in performance, and low satisfaction.