Two Theories of Emotional Labor - Essay Example

Emotional Labor in the Workplace Emotion in the workplace has often been something that organizations were reluctant to talk about and most employees were reluctant to express. In the past several years, the idea of emotional intelligence has brought emotion into the workplace in a more positive way. Emotion has been examined by organizations to understand how it could be used in negotiations and aspects of customer service. Prior to this time, the organizational environment was seen as a rational rather than emotional environment and most leaders thought that emotions were detrimental to the workplace. Many CEOs believed that emotions would get in the way of managers being able to make good decisions (Grandey, 2000). Research has shown however, that emotions can be a very positive aspect of the workplace and can be used to meet organizational goals. Regulation of Emotions in the Workplace In his play, “As You Like It,” Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players …” (Shakespeare, 2003). If this is true, then each of us is an emotional actor who plays various roles upon the state of home, work and the community. At home with family and friends, we act one way and with friends we act in a different way. In the workplace, most people have a totally different persona because they want to do their best and they may feel that emotions make them vulnerable. The challenge is that the average person cannot leave who they are totally at home; they will bring some of who they are to the workplace and this includes their emotions. According to Grandey (2000) emotional labor can involve “enhancing, faking or suppressing emotions to modify the emotional expression” (p. 95). Emotional labor has display rules that decide how emotions are to be expressed inside the organization. The rules may be told in some way to employees through training materials or they may be learned by observing other co-workers. There may be specific emotions that must be used in specific situations in organizations. As an example, anyone working in customer service will need to smile and be friendly to customers in order to keep customers happy. This is one example of how emotions come into an organization and can be used successfully. Two Theories of Emotional Labor There are many theories about emotional labor in the workplace. The first theory began with Hochschild in 1983. Hochschild is a sociologist and saw emotional labor as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” (Grandey, 2000, p. 96). He observed this from the perspective of the interaction between customers and employees. He saw that customer interactions and saw customers as an audience and employees were the actors that provided a stage for the customers to understand the product or service. Hochschild suggested that learning to manage emotions was one way for employees to meet their organization’s goals (Grandey, 2000). Employees are always on stage at work according to this theory, and showing negative emotions would create a problem with their performance. Hochschild suggested two major ways that employees as actors could manage their emotions. These two were through surface acting, where the individual is able to regulate their emotional expressions and through deep acting, where the individual is able to consciously modify their feelings “in order to express the desired emotions” (Grandey, 2000, p. 96). Hochschild states that managing emotion takes effort on the part of the employee. In contrast, Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) described emotional labor as “the act of displaying appropriate emotions with the goal to engage in a form of impression management for the organization” (Grandey, 2000, p. 96). These researchers saw emotional labor as an observable behavior instead of the management of feelings. They felt that emotional labor did not need a conscious effort to control emotions because it was observable only. Their focus was on the idea that emotional labor was only important to the point where it was related to task performance. They further suggested that customers were satisfied if the individual was friendly and if the customer perceived that the friendliness was genuine. They thought that if employees were not being genuine, they were faking their emotions and this caused them to disassociate from themselves (Grandey, 2000). These two theories show that emotions are important to the workplace and that organizations must take emotions into consideration if they what employees to do their best work. Emotions are Part of the Social Structure Because employees come to the workplace with emotions they learned from childhood, and from the various environments they are in, and everyone has different ways of expressing emotion, the fact that emotion is social must be examined. Hoschild saw that there is power in the social environment. In fact, emotions are a part of every social exchange and there are certain “rules” that exist in order to ensure “social stability” for all people involved (Bolton, 2006). Because of this, actors (employees) can do a variety of emotional work and they can choose when, what, how and to whom they give emotion and how much emotion to give. This was important to customer satisfaction. Grandey et al. (2005) studied emotional labor and how it related to customer satisfaction. They found that those employees, who expressed emotion and did a task well, were perceived by the customer as friendly and helpful. Kopelman, Rosette and Thompson (2006) found that emotions could be used during negotiations to influence them. They found that positive emotions could have a large influence on negotiations because they allowed the parties involved to have “mutually beneficial outcomes” in the negotiations, especially when they were bargaining face to face (p. 83). Emotional labor can be used in many ways, but a question begins to surface that asks what happens when emotional labor creates challenges for the employees? This can lead to burnout and other challenges. Emotional Labor and Burnout Brotheridge and Grandey (2002) studied burnout as it applied to emotional labor. Generally, they found that people were more influenced by their perception of job demands than they were by their actual job categories. In other words, the employees who experience burnout were more affected by how they felt about their jobs than they were about the actual job. When they perceived that the job was too stressful, they were more apt to experience burnout. Hochschild (1983) states that “there is a cost to emotion work: it affects the degree to which we listen to feeling and sometimes our very capacity to feel” (p. 76). In this respect, many people are very entrenched in their work to the point where work becomes their identity, which means that people must find ways to cope with the emotional work. Some of the ways that this happens is that people will disassociate from the work if it is too emotionally stressful which can cause challenges for their customers, particularly in helping professions. As an example, a nurse is expected to show positive emotions and be very helpful to patients. If the nurse gets too involved with the emotions of helping people, this can lead to dissociation so that they can distance themselves from the emotions. This could make the patient feel as though the nurse is uncaring or cold. The best way to cope with emotions is to take time for oneself and make sure that there are ways to get the emotions out that they may have had to suppress at times. References Bolton, S.C. (2006). Hochschild’s ‘Managed Heart.’ Book Review. Retrieved from www.workandsociety.com/downloads/eaw3.pdf Brotheridge, C.M. and Grandey, A.A. (2002). Emotional labor and burnout: comparing two Perpsectives of “people work” Journal of Vocational Behavior 60, 17–39. doi:10.1006/jvbe.2001.1815 Grandey, A.A. (2000). Emotion regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5, (1). 95-110. doi: 10.1037//1076-8898.5.1.95 Grandey, A.A., Fisk, G.M., Matilla, A.S., Jansen, K.J., and Sideman, L.A. (2005). Is “service with a smile” enough? Authenticity of positive displays during service encounters. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 96, 38-55. doi: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2004.08.002 Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press Kopelman, S., Rosette, A.S. and Thompson, L. (2006). The three faces of Eve: Strategic displays of positive, negative, and neutral emotions in negotiations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 99, 81-101. doi: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.08.003. Shakespeare, W. (2003). All the world’s a stage from “As You Like It.” Poem Hunter. Retrieved from http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/all-the-world-s-a-stage/ Read More