Emotional labour involves recognising emotions, naming them, and responding in ways that allow relationships and institutions to function. It includes smoothing conflict, anticipating emotional needs, holding space for difficult conversations, and ensuring emotional continuity over time. Emotional labour is essential to society.
Relationships, families, and workplaces do not function on logic alone; they are sustained by emotional regulation, empathy, and care. Every system that depends on human interaction relies on someone doing the work of noticing emotional dynamics, managing tensions, and maintaining trust.
When Emotional Labour Becomes Harmful
The problem is not emotional labour itself, but its unequal distribution. When emotional labour is shared and recognised, it strengthens relationships and organisations. When it is taken for granted, it becomes a quiet burden. This is where emotional labour becomes gendered; women are expected to manage the emotional consequences of others’ discomfort with emotion.
How Allyship Can Prevent Emotional Labour
Many men are encouraged to approach work and relationships through logic, restraint, and emotional control. These traits are often associated with professionalism and leadership, particularly in workplace settings. While they may support focus and decisiveness, at their worst, these traits limit emotional engagement rather than strengthen it. Emotional restraint is not the same as emotional competence. When emotions are left unnamed or unprocessed, they continue to influence behaviour, communication, and conflict, often in indirect ways. Silence, dismissiveness, or disengagement may reduce immediate discomfort, but they rarely lead to resolution.
In these moments, emotional labour does not disappear. It shifts. Someone must still name what went wrong and hold the tension. Constructive allyship here is not about abandoning logic or indulging unfiltered emotion. It is about emotional responsibility; the willingness to stay engaged, to recognise emotional dynamics, and to participate in resolving them rather than stepping away from them.
When emotional responsibility is shared, working relationships become more resilient, conflict becomes more productive, and collaboration improves for everyone.
How Emotional Labor Often Plays Out
I recently observed a workplace disagreement between two colleagues — one male, one female. Both left the interaction dissatisfied, with the core issue unresolved. Emotions were clearly present on both sides. The difference lay in how those emotions were handled. The man’s response was dismissiveness — withdrawing from engagement and minimising the emotional dimension of the disagreement. The woman, left without resolution, absorbed the emotional tension until it eventually surfaced as frustration.
Dismissiveness is not emotional maturity; it is an avoidance strategy. And when one person disengages emotionally, someone else must carry the unresolved weight of the interaction. Over time, this dynamic is deeply unproductive. It preserves the appearance of professionalism while undermining trust, collaboration, and honest problem-solving.
How Shared Emotional Labour Strengthens Work Relationships
1. Conflict Resolution
When emotional labour is shared, conflict is addressed rather than avoided or absorbed. Parties are more likely to name tensions early, listen without defensiveness, and stay engaged long enough to reach a resolution. This prevents issues from resurfacing repeatedly and reduces the emotional cost of unresolved disagreements. Shared emotional responsibility turns conflict into a tool for clarity, not a threat to harmony.
2. Collaboration
Effective collaboration depends on psychological safety — the sense that ideas can be expressed without ridicule or dismissal. Shared emotional labour ensures that no single person is responsible for maintaining this safety. When team members collectively regulate tone, respond respectfully, and acknowledge impact, collaboration becomes more honest, inclusive, and productive.
3. Trust-Building
Trust is built not only through competence, but through consistency and emotional reliability. When emotional labour is evenly distributed, colleagues experience follow-through, accountability, and mutual respect. Trust erodes when one person repeatedly absorbs tension while others disengage. Shared emotional labour makes trust a collective outcome, not an individual sacrifice.
4. Expectations Management
Many workplace conflicts stem from misaligned expectations that go unspoken. Emotional labour plays a role in naming assumptions, clarifying boundaries, and recalibrating roles when circumstances change. When this work is shared, expectations are surfaced earlier and adjusted collaboratively, reducing resentment and miscommunication.
5. Productive Communication
Productive communication requires more than clarity of content; it requires attention to tone, timing, and impact. Shared emotional labour allows conversations to remain direct without becoming dismissive, and honest without becoming hostile. This creates space for feedback that improves performance rather than damaging relationships.
6. Decision-Making Quality
When emotional dynamics are acknowledged, decisions benefit from fuller participation and less post-decision resistance. People are more likely to support outcomes they feel heard in, even when their preferred option is not chosen. Shared emotional labour ensures buy-in is built alongside logic.
7. Retention and Engagement
Workplaces where emotional labour is recognised and distributed more fairly experience lower burnout and higher engagement, particularly among women. Employees are more likely to stay in environments where emotional effort is not invisibly extracted or taken for granted.
8. Leadership Effectiveness
Leadership is not just about direction-setting; it is about holding people through change, uncertainty, and pressure. Leaders who share emotional labour model emotional responsibility, set healthier norms, and reduce reliance on informal, gendered emotional work within teams.
9. Reputation and Culture
Over time, how emotional labour is handled shapes organisational culture. Teams that distribute emotional responsibility fairly develop reputations for respect, fairness, and professionalism. This strengthens internal culture and external credibility.
Final Thoughts
Sharing emotional labour does not require abandoning professionalism or indulging emotional immaturity. It requires emotional competence: the ability to stay engaged in difficult conversations, to name tensions rather than avoid them, and to recognise that unresolved emotions shape outcomes whether they are acknowledged or not. As conversations around gender equity and male allyship evolve, emotional responsibility must be part of the discussion. Not as a moral demand, but as a leadership skill and an organisational asset. When emotional labour is recognised and more evenly distributed, workplaces become more resilient, decisions more durable, and relationships more productive.
