중소기업 창업가가 인지하는 조직원에 대한 감정노동의 목적과 실행에 대한 탐색적 연구

Among the factors deemed essential for entrepreneurial success, the employees who constitute a new venture represent a critical resource. Yet entrepreneurs frequently encounter practical challenges in managing their personnel, and the emotional labor they perform to overcome these challenges has a direct impact on venture survival. Prior research on emotional labor has largely focused on competencies required of managers within large?scale organizations, failing to reflect the realities faced by founders of small and medium?sized enterprises (SMEs). This exploratory study investigates, via semi?structured interviews with ten SME founders, (1) the purposes driving their emotional labor, (2) the scope and modalities of its deployment, and (3) their satisfaction with performing emotional labor. The findings reveal that SME entrepreneurs engage in emotional labor to cultivate authentic and intimate relationships with team members?thereby preventing the departure of key talent and alleviating the resource constraints endemic to small firms. Although emotional labor is often partitioned into public and private domains, its implementation by founders extends across all aspects of interactions with organizational members, in both breadth and frequency. Following each episode of emotional labor, founders reported a consolatory form of satisfaction grounded in observable positive shifts in employee behavior, rather than intrinsic emotional gratification. By examining the objectives, execution, and satisfaction associated with emotional labor among SME founders, this study offers both theoretical and practical implications for understanding the unique emotional labor processes that underpin entrepreneurial management in resource?constrained settings.