Despite much academic work and the development of multiple typologies, we are still some way from understanding the HR role. There is a dearth of empirical evidence on HR professionals' work and recent models have been criticized for not adequately reflecting the challenges of trying to balance competing stakeholder interests. We approach this lacuna by focusing on an issue that has not been fully considered in relation to HR work – emotion. Drawing on the findings of a broader study into emotional labour, we highlight the emotive challenges inherent in the day‐to‐day practice of HR. We explore the disjunctions between ‘felt’ emotions and those actually displayed to meet differing stakeholders' expectations. We show how achieving an appropriate emotion display is a challenging pursuit given these competing expectations. Our contribution is to elucidate emotional labour in the under‐researched ‘backstage’ professional context, and through our emotion focus to extend our understanding of the complexity of the HR role beyond current prescriptive models.

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With exhortations to be ‘your authentic self’ proliferating in workplaces what does this mean for emotion and identity management at work? This article explores the relationship between emotional labour and identity. It focuses on the tension or ‘emotional dissonance’ that can be experienced when a job role requires the display of organizationally appropriate emotions. Experiences of emotional dissonance are examined through in-depth interviews and diary study with human resource professionals. We tease out the contradictions participants are immersed in, the affective sensemaking they engage in about such contradictions and demonstrate the individual’s capacity for multiple selves to address contextual demands. From this, a new conceptual lens on emotional dissonance is proposed. Conventional conceptualizations view dissonance as a clash between ‘real’ and ‘false’ emotion predicated on an authentic self that is transmuted in organizational settings. Our theoretical contribution is to argue that emotional dissonance arises from the struggle to construct a situationally salient self in the face of conflicting emotions and loyalties to competing selves and values. The struggle in emotional labour is not with ‘the truth of oneself’ but rather with identifying which self to foreground in a given situation.

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