The hidden glue: invisible emotional labor as a driver of women’s organizational commitment

Background and purpose Invisible emotional labor, meaning unrecognized relational work that women perform outside their formal job requirements, falls on them at rates men do not share. Research has documented what this work costs. However, an important gap remains: existing theory explains that invisible emotional labor is costly and that it is unequally distributed by gender, but it does not explain the mechanisms by which this labor may also contribute to organizational commitment, nor how those mechanisms differ across the four dimensions of such labor. This paper contributes to organizational behavior theory by explaining how invisible emotional labor can lead to both employee attachment and psychological depletion. Design, findings, and implications This conceptual review draws on a structured search of five sources yielding a core corpus of 54 publications cited in the synthesis, supplemented by 28 further works cited in the text, organized across four thematic areas: the gendered distribution and structural determinants of invisible emotional labor; mechanisms linking emotional labor to organizational commitment; recognition and its absence; and career, well-being, and identity consequences. We propose the Gendered Relational Commitment Model (GRCM), which identifies four dimensions of invisible emotional labor (relational maintenance, emotional regulation, organizational caretaking, and identity management) and links each to an established form of organizational commitment (affective, continuance, or normative) through its own mechanism. The model introduces relational capital (an individual’s accumulated, organization-specific store of relational and emotional knowledge) as a proposed mediator linking emotional regulation to continuance commitment and builds a dual-pathway account that supplements and extends the predominantly depletive framing that Conservation of Resources theory has offered. Four testable propositions follow from the framework. Section 6 outlines the HR practices that would follow specifically if those propositions were supported by future empirical research.