The social conditions of the late 20th century—characterized by intensified market competition and the rise of the service industry—strengthened the tendency to utilize everything as a competitive tool, and in that process, the commodification of emotions, namely emotional labor, came to receive attention. Emotional labor refers to the effort employees make to regulate their own emotions in order to perform, as part of their job duties, the emotional expressions externally displayed through tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures during interpersonal interactions. The purpose of this paper was to verify two issues concerning emotional labor through empirical research. First, after critically reviewing existing discussions on emotional labor performance strategies, the paper proposed a new classification scheme for emotional labor performance strategies and empirically validated its appropriateness. Second, through theoretical discussion, the antecedent variables of emotional labor performance strategies were categorized into three groups—individual characteristics, characteristics of interaction with customers, and emotional labor management mechanisms—and the paper empirically examined how these influence the selection and utilization of emotional labor performance strategies. To achieve these research objectives, a survey was conducted among nurses working at five general hospitals in South Korea, and data collected from 470 respondents were analyzed, yielding the following results. First, the validity of classifying emotional labor performance strategies into four types—deep acting, surface acting, genuine acting, and emotional deviance—was empirically confirmed. Next, among individual characteristics, characteristics of interaction with customers, and emotional labor management mechanisms, individual characteristics were found to have the most powerful influence on emotional labor performance strategies. Characteristics of interaction with customers and emotional labor management mechanisms influenced emotional labor performance strategies only selectively. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications and limitations of this study were presented.