The Emotional Labor of Evaluation: Toward Emotional Competence by Marsha Watson-Hylton, Kristina Shea, and Alana Rieg

Date: Monday, March 9, 2026

Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.

Hello! We are Marsha Watson-Hylton, Kristina Shea and Alana Rieg, second year doctoral students in evaluation and industrial organizational psychology at Claremont Graduate University. Today’s post explores emotional labor – the often invisible work of managing feelings while navigating interest holder dynamics, difficult evaluation findings, and trauma narratives – and offers strategies for building emotional competence.

The Challenge

I remember my early days as an evaluator in international development. During one evaluation, I listened to program participants share their alienating experiences in an educational intervention – an encounter that left an indelible mark on me. Over 15 years in this field, I’ve realized that, as evaluators, we often engage with communities impacted by exclusion, poverty, violence, health and educational inequity. Psychology tells us that sustained exposure to such narratives can lead to burnout, secondary trauma, and compassion fatigue.

Our positionality – who we are and how participants perceive us – shapes how we carry this emotional weight. Evaluators who identify with a particular community may experience deeper resonance, while outsiders may grapple with legitimacy, privilege, and the challenge of building trust. While evaluation is often framed as technical – methods, indicators, reports – our work involves emotional labor: listening to difficult stories, regulating our responses, and carrying the weight of human experience. These experiences aren’t unique to me; they are inherent to evaluation work.

Lessons Learned

• Three Forms of Emotional Labor: Understanding how we manage emotions matters. Surface acting (suppressing authentic feelings) consistently leads to exhaustion. Deep acting (genuinely working to experience desired emotions) is less depleting but still taxing. Genuine emotional expression – when our evaluation approaches create space for authenticity – is associated with job satisfaction and reduced burnout.
• Evaluation Approaches Matter: Deficit-based accountability models often position evaluators as fault-finders, creating defensive dynamics. In contrast, appreciative inquiry, developmental evaluation, participatory andempowerment approaches may reduce adversarial dynamics by emphasizing collaboration and learning. Recognizing how our chosen approaches shape emotional demands helps us design more sustainable practice.
• The Positive Side: Emotional labor isn’t merely depleting. When approached intentionally, it can be a source of meaning and professional fulfillment. Bearing witness to community resilience creates vicarious resilience, i.e., inspiration and growth from witnessing strengths and recovery. Positive emotions in collaborative evaluations can create upward spirals of engagement for both evaluators and interest holders.

Hot Tips

• Build Emotional Self-Awareness: Identify your emotional triggers – situations or interest holder behaviors that evoke strong responses. Reflect on how your positionality shapes your emotional experiences. Use validated measures like the Professional Quality of Life Scale to monitor for burnout and compassion fatigue.
• Practice In-the-Moment Regulation: Cognitive reappraisal (reframing situations to alter emotional impact), brief mindfulness exercises, and strategic breaks during intense activities reduce emotional reactivity. Set clear professional boundaries: define project scope, limit after-hours availability, and say no to work beyond your emotional capacity.
• Create Team Support Structures: After emotionally intensive phases – difficult presentations, trauma-exposed data collection – structured team debriefs create space for collective processing. Rotate assignments to prevent sustained exposure to high-trauma work. Foster psychological safety where team members can acknowledge struggles without fear of appearing incompetent.
• Cultivate Self-Compassion: Treat yourself with kindness during difficulty. Acknowledge that evaluation work is inherently challenging. Recognize that struggle is part of the human experience. Practice self-compassion exercises specifically designed for helping professionals.

Rad Resources

• On Emotional Labor: Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling
• On Trauma-Informed Practice:  Guide to Trauma-Informed Care Principles
• On Mindfulness: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction resources
• On Positive Psychology: Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions

Moving Forward Together

Emotional labor in evaluation is inevitable, but unmanaged emotional labor leads to burnout and attrition. By naming this dimension of our work, we can normalize evaluator emotional experiences, develop individual and organizational strategies for emotional competence, and advocate for systemic changes supporting evaluator well-being. During times of organizational disruption, collective responses – professional communities, shared resources, advocacy – become especially critical.

What has your emotional labor been like as an evaluator?

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