Emotional Labour as an Unpriced Cost of Human Capital in Seasonal Tourism Work: An Instrument-Screening Pilot from the Podhale Region

Abstract

Frontline service in tourism is a paradigm case of emotional labour, an input the wage does not price separately yet one whose hidden costs — presenteeism, exhaustion, somatic symptoms — plausibly depreciate human capital. This paper reports the instrument-screening stage of that inquiry, not a test of the economic argument. A cross-sectional pilot surveyed sixty-four frontline workers in the Podhale region on five-point scales. Reliability is reported with statistics appropriate to scale length. The exhaustion, psychological-safety and self-regulation scales were adequately consistent (Spearman-Brown 0.79, 0.79, 0.81); the somatic-symptom and presenteeism scales were not (0.32 and 0.02), and the five-item surface-acting scale reached an alpha of only 0.30. That scale also failed a validity check: its association with exhaustion was negative, contrary to meta-analytic evidence, and item analysis locates the reversal in a single item read normatively rather than in restriction of range. The burden variables were reported at high levels and pay adequacy at low levels, but the burden distributions are ceiling-bound, so their levels cannot be interpreted. Within a family of twenty-three tests one association survives familywise correction, and it is a coherence check, not a finding. The yield is a specification of the requirements for the main study.