Is Dealing with Emotional Labor Profitable for Managers in High-Quality Hotels - Literature review Example

 Is Dealing with Emotional Labor Profitable for Managers in High-Quality Hotels? Executive summary The modern changes in the economy from manufacturing industries to service industries have witnessed a new element coming out. Unlike in the manufacturing industries where employees deal with machines and equipment in the service industries, employees handle people. This requires face-to-face, as well as voice-to-voice interactions. Such a service industry is the hotel industry that has display rules that its employees are expected to exhibit when serving customers. Employees experience emotional labor because, no matter how harsh a customer may appear, they must put on happy faces, show friendliness and warmth to such a customer by regulating their emotions. This paper sought to establish if dealing with emotional labor by high-quality hotel managers is profitable. Through descriptive study design, this paper used secondary sources t obtain relevant data for this study. The findings showed that hotel managers appreciate that they must handle their customers in a friendly and warm manner if they are to grow. They believe that customers' perception of their service quality is critical, and they, thus, require their employees to display positive emotions to the customers. The type of emotional labor that employees show include the genuine acting, deep acting, and surface acting. In order to have the right fit for hotels, managers use the human resource department that assists in recruiting, selecting, training and empowering their employees to ensure that they are happy and do not suffer from emotional exhaustion and dissonance. Introduction In this contemporary world, emotions form an important part of our life. According to Prethen’s (2015 study, expression of emotion has become a basic human need just as it is the case with the need for food, water, and shelter. Emotions have become integral and inseparable parts of everyday organizational life. The experience of work has been attributed to the contribution of emotions, which give an impact of daily emotion to corporate life. Only a few individuals know how to control their emotions while others do not. Through emotion labor, the role of emotion management in the workplace and its impact on the outcome of an individual’s work can be understood. The concept of emotional labor was first coined by Arlie Hochschild in 1983 in her study of flight attendants’ work. In this piece of analysis, Arlie Hochschild was referring to the self and other emotion management in a paid workplace (Amishyasiri, 2015; Kiely, 2008). According to Toerien and Kitzinger’s (2007) study, emotional labor emphasizes the relational as opposed to the task-based aspect of work with a greater emphasis on the service economy. It is characterized by being labor-intensive, effort-intensive, skilled, and productive labor. Chu’s (2002) study defines emotional labor as the degree of manipulation of an individual’s inner feeling or outward behavior with the aim of displaying the appropriate emotion in response to occupational norms. This paper aims at establishing whether dealing with emotional labor is profitable for managers in high-quality hotels. It will use descriptive research design to facilitate proper understanding of the research objective through an in-depth analysis of the thesis statement. Secondary sources will be the primary data sources used in this study as the study will not practically be conducted in the field. These secondary sources are those scholarly works that have been done by scholars in the field of psychology, organization behavior, hospitality industry, as well as other academic articles on the issues of emotional labor. Among the consulted sources, are refereed journal articles, credible reports, textbooks and reliable websites. Emotional Labor in Hotel Industry Hotels fall under the hospitality industry, where the spirit is to get the job done with the right attitude and degree of sincerity, as well as with the right amount of attention and concern for the guests. According to Chu’s (2002) study, every entity in the hospitality industry requires its employees to display certain types of emotion when interacting with clients. Such emotions include friendliness, cheerfulness, warmth, confidence and enthusiasm. The nature of the hospitality industry; in this case, hotels, is that they are service occupations and involve a lot of voice-to-voice or face-to-face interactions with customers, clients, and the public. In the hotel sector, the interaction between the person offering the service and the client is very critical. Precisely, it is a service experience core that influences the perception of the customer of the service quality. It is, therefore, vital that hotel managers regulate and manage the behavior or emotional expressions of their employees to ensure service quality. There is a common believe in the service industries, as well as other that a high correlation between smiling faces of employees and increasing revenues subsists (Chu, 2002). According to Shania, Uriely, Reichelb, and Ginsburg’s (2014) research findings, service employees' emotional labor adds to the financial value of the hotel industry because these emotions are in line with the industry’s strategic goals and objectives of customer delight, positive word of mouth and return intent. All these highly desired outcomes strongly depend on customers’ perceptions of employees’ emotional authenticity. In view of an understanding of this, hotel managers cultivate positive emotions display in their employees in order to appear sincere in their expressions. The display of enthusiasm and friendliness increases customer satisfaction, result in increased repeat business, improve sales immediately, and ultimately leads to financial success. It is, therefore, important that managers conduct a piece of training and advice to their employees on how to act even when confronted with difficult customers in order to change the situation and make it a positive experience. Negative emotional displays are highly prohibited in the hotels because active emotional displays are essential. As a result, employees’ emotional displays have shifted from being private experiences to public acts that are controlled by managers or employers. Managers develop rules for emotional display and make training programs mandatory, such that their employees go through periodic sessions where they are taught how to smile in a sincere manner and how to change their anger or impatience into public empathy and kindness. Through these types of practices, employees get to learn how to stamp down their real feelings and display emotions that employers desire. The manner in which hotel employees experience their emotions is appropriately dictated by the feeling that constitute the organization. According to Nabring’s (2004) assessment, these feelings can be dictated by formal, as well as informal practices brought about by the organizational culture. The three main techniques through which employees perform emotional labor include the surface acting, deep acting, and the genuine acting. Through surface acting, hotel employees alter their outward appearance in order to display the required emotions. Nabring’s (2004) study notes that employees’ feign felt emotions and express them in order to comply with the organization’s mandate. This is common when an employee is speaking with an angry client. Despite feeling anger and hostility towards the client, the employee expresses happiness and concern for such a client. Figure 1: Emotional disharmony in surface acting Through surface acting, employees experience three types of emotional disharmony as shown in figure 1 above. The emotional disharmony is caused by emotional deviance, emotional dissonance, and emotive faking, which, if not properly managed, they trigger the emergence of adverse outcomes. In the running of hotels, managers consider emotional dissonance as problematic, given that employees can have low self-esteem, depression, as well as psychological strain, thereby affecting their service delivery to customers. Through emotional deviance, employees suffer from emotional exhaustion since they have the tendency not to display the required expression of emotions, either intentionally or accidentally (Hwa, Supinah, Japanga, & Nasah, 2010). Hotel managers manage this because they appreciate that such employees are unable to control emotions adequately and may display negative emotions to customers, thereby making them have a wrong perception about the organization and its quality of service (Kogovsek & Kogovsek, 2011). Through emotive faking, customers may perceive service quality as being poor. Through deep acting, hotel employees alter their physical expressions, as well as inner feelings by recalling or imaging similar emotional experiences. Employees are taught how to picture their work experience by relying on past experiences. In the case of genuine acting, employees express emotions that they feel and that are congruent with display rules (Chu, 2002). From figure 2 below, the concept of emotional labor was presented by Prethen’s (2015) study to supplement what this paper has just said on the available displays through which employees manage emotions to meet the work role demand. In the hotel industry, employees show appropriate emotion by emphasizing the act of behavior as opposed to the internal state driving their behavior. All cells in the figure below represent compliance with display rule, and the hotel managers should understand them to manage their employees' emotions appropriately. Cell 2 and 3 denote cases where hotel employees' compliances are inconsistent with felt emotions. Cell 2 shows that negative emotions are felt, but they do not indicate a case of an appropriately suppressed display. Cell 3 shows an appropriately faked display as positive emotion is expressed though not felt. It is cell 2 and cell 3 that are critical in the management of emotional labor. Cells 1 and 4 represent cases where compliances are consistent with felt emotions. In cell 4, there are positive emotions being felt and displayed while, in cell 1, there is an absence of both felt and expressed emotion. Figure 2: Conceptual of emotional labor (Prethen, 2015) In the hotel industry, employees must be friendly and courteous to other people, since this is a value-added part of the service they offer. Therefore, hotel managers appreciate that the good cheer and friendliness of their employees are core and strongly related to customer satisfaction, leading to increased customer commitment and loyalty, and, therefore, affect their bottom lines. This paper established some reasons as to why the hotel managers view employees’ emotional display as critical in their service business so as to determine customers’ service quality perception (Hwa, Supinah, Japanga, & Nasah, 2010). First and foremost, the contact between employees and customers is the interface between the customers and hotels. Thus, employees present the organization to the customers. Hotel managers know that if their employees are rude to customers, that rudeness leaves an awful perception about the hotel in the mind of customers. The second concern about hotel managers is the nature of their service. This paper established that hotels offer services that are characterized by being intangible, variability, heterogeneous and inseparable between service providers and customers. As a result, this nature of hotel services makes the interaction between customers and hotel employees a critical component in dictating customers’ perception service quality (Johanson & Woods, 2015). In order to achieve the desired emotional display, hotel managers use the services of the human resource department to employ some strategies that include recruitment and selection strategies, training and support strategies, and empowerment (Hwa, Supinah, Japanga, & Nasah, 2010; Johanson & Woods, 2015). Through recruitment and selection, the human resource personnel ensures that they recruit and later select those candidates who rightfully fit their organizational culture. In addition, they are required to exhibit the right type of personality for their positions. Through this process, emotional harmony is almost guaranteed, in which the actual emotions of employees are congruent with those specified by display rules. The hotels use effective recruitment strategies that are specific and consistent in order to hire the right type of persons. This paper established that they first prescreen employees using personal tests, which act as critical selection techniques. Candidates who pass the personality test screen, qualify for an interview, which is carried out using situational stress type questions that focus on the service experience, particularly, guest service problems. Exercises and work sample evaluations are also used to assess the candidates’ communication skills and characteristics such as the natural and genuine friendliness, warmth and compassion (Hwa, Supinah, Japanga, & Nasah, 2010). Even through these processes are expensive to the company, the management does not hesitate to follow them, believing that these costs will be recovered through better service quality, job satisfaction, and reduced turnover. Another strategy used by hotel managers to manage the emotional labor is through training and employee support (Hwa, Supinah, Japanga, & Nasah, 2010). In order to reap big from their employees, hotel managers invest heavily in the development, as well as care for their employees. Through these programs, the factors causing emotional labor stresses are eliminated or significantly reduced. Among the training strategies that hotel managers have put in place to support their employees' emotional labor, include: the provision of skill training to enhance the delivery of a suitable guest service experience; establishment of guest service standards and giving display rule training; maintenance of employee assistance programs to assist employees learn approaches to combating stress; and use of scripts as a framework for the desired service. The scripts help employees in understanding how and when certain actions should be taken in response to customers. Employees are shown how to be friendly and courteous, responsive to guests' needs, show empathy, in addition to teaching them the display rules. Additionally, scripts make employees gain a sense of satisfaction by putting them in a position to act out the desired behavior without suffering stress from emotional labor. Hotel managers also train their employees on how to solve problems, which also assist them in delivering services as desired. Besides, training in listening skills is done in order to help employees to listen better and understand customers' requests and comments. This paper also established that hotel managers offer support systems, including working with teams, advice, counseling with coworkers, sensitivity training that discuss emotional issues and allow employees to seek help, training on how to balance family and work issues, and coping skills since they appreciate their immense contributions to emotional labor. Further results showed that hotel managers use job enlargement and rotation, assigning and requiring standard uniforms, having scheduled breaks, are equally useful in combating emotional labor problems. Empowerment was the third strategy, which hotel managers offer to empower their employees to solve some issues on their own. It ultimately improves service encounters by the customers (Johanson & Woods, 2015). Through empowerment, employees can quickly settle guests’ complaints and concomitantly greater guest satisfaction. After empowering employees, hotel managers use measures such as emotional effort, communication skills, guest relations skills, and commitment to guests’ well-being to evaluate them. Conclusion This paper sought to establish whether it is profitable for high-quality managers to manage emotional labor. The findings of this paper determined that hotel managers have placed a high strategic importance of their services to their customers, and the public. Given that their industry is service-oriented, hotel managers actively involve themselves in addressing emotional labor issues in their workplaces. They take necessary strategies in making their employees understand the impact of emotional labor on their performance. Employees are, thus, required to display the highest level of warmth, friendliness, care and empathy to customers, including those who seem rude to them. This is from the realization that customers might have a negative perception of the service quality, which may lead to the loss of business. Therefore, hotel managers always ensure that their businesses reap big and gain financial value. References Amishyasiri. (2015). Emotional Labor - Helping Workers Present a Positive Face. Retrieved May 3, 2015, from Mind Tools Ltd: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_44.htm Chu, K. H.-L. (2002). The Effects of Emotional Labor on Employee Work Outcomes. Blacksburg, Virginia: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Hwa, A. M., Supinah, R., Japanga, M., & Nasah, C. R. (2010). Service With A Smile: A Human Resources Perspective Of Emotional Labor. Labuan e-Journal of Muamalat and Society, 26-33. Johanson, M. M., & Woods, R. H. (2015). Recognizing the emotional element in service excellence. Retrieved May 3, 2015, from Gale Cengage Learning: http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|A184324460&v=2.1&u=scu_au&it=r&p=EAIM&sw=w&asid=0581ec5c0a5ae245ea0ec673329e7812 Kiely, S. (2008). Emotional Labour: A significant interpersonal stressor. Retrieved May 3, 2015, from The Australian Psychological Society Limited: https://www.psychology.org.au/inpsych/emotional_labour/ Kogovsek, M., & Kogovsek, M. (2011). Emotional Labour In Hospitality Industry: Literature Review. Quaestus Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 115-130. Nabring, R. L. (2004). Consequences Of Emotional Labor:An Examination In A For-Profit Organization. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia. Prethen, B. (2015). Emotional Labor. Academia.edu. Shania, A., Uriely, N., Reichelb, A., & Ginsburgb, L. (2014). Emotional labor in the hospitality industry: The influence of contextual factors. International Journal of Hospitality Management 37, 150-158. Toerien, M., & Kitzinger, C. (2007). Emotional Labour in Action: Navigating Multiple Involvements in the Beauty Salon. Sociology, 645-661. Read More