Emotional job demands diminish employees’ sympathy over 9 years, but only for those with a low learning goal orientation

Abstract Many professions require emotional effort from employees to perform their jobs effectively. Research on the consequences of such emotional job demands (EJDs) for employees has yielded mixed findings with only a few longitudinal studies. This study’s aim is to improve the understanding of how EJDs affect the development of employees’ emotional functioning over time, specifically the degree of sympathy they experience toward others, and which factors enhance or buffer this relationship. Drawing on the theoretical model of strengths and vulnerabilities integration, we predict that occupation-level EJDs reduce employees’ sympathy over a 9-year time period. At the same time, we predict that a learning goal orientation (LGO), the motivation for task mastery and self-improvement, buffers the potentially negative effects of EJDs on sympathy changes. We test our model using data from N = 831 working adults from the second and third waves of the Midlife in the United States survey in combination with data from the Occupational Information Network. In line with predictions, results from latent change score models show that although sympathy on average increases over the 9-year span, EJDs have a negative effect on these changes and a LGO moderates this effect so that EJDs have a negative effect on sympathy changes only for employees low in LGO. We discuss implications for theory and practice.