Emotional Labor
Emotional labor refers to the effort and energy required to manage and regulate one's emotions in a professional setting. This can involve displaying specific emotions, such as empathy or enthusiasm, to meet the expectations of clients, colleagues, or customers. It often involves suppressing one's true feelings and requires a significant amount of mental and emotional energy.
8 Key excerpts on "Emotional Labor"
- Su Mi Dahlgaard-Park(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Emotional Labor Emotional Labor 189 195 Emotional Labor Employees who interact with customers, clients, or other service recipientsare often required to perform Emotional Labor as part of their role. Theyregulate their emotions so that they align with organizational expectationsfor how emotions should be displayed. This may be done through surfaceacting, which involves hiding one’s real feelings and expressing theappropriate emotions, or through deep acting, which focuses on aligninginner feelings with expressed emotions. The manner in which Emotional Labor is performedinfluences the extent to which it has positive or negative outcomes foremployees, organizations, and the service recipients. It should be notedthat Emotional Labor refers to the regulation of emotions undertaken inexchange for a wage; thus, it is distinct from the construct of emotionwork, which is typically applied in nonwork domains and entails, forexample, providing emotional support in one’s family life. This entryintroduces the construct of Emotional Labor, reviews the predictors ofEmotional Labor and its potential consequences, and then discusses theimplications of the foregoing for managing service organizations. The Construct of Emotional Labor The term Emotional Labor was first coined in the 1980s by thesociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who studied how flight attendantswere required to manage their emotions during their interactions withairplane passengers...
eBook - ePub- Timothy L. G. Lockyer(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Hochschild (1983) termed this regulation of one’s emotions to comply with occupational or organizational norms as “Emotional Labor.” She defined Emotional Labor as the management of feeling to manipulate ones physical expressions such as facial expressions and therefore Emotional Labor is sold for a wage. Therefore it has an exchange value (Hochschild, 1983). Across a number of occupational roles, the act of expressing socially relevant emotions (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993) during service transactions is the basis for Emotional Labor. Employees perform Emotional Labor when they regulate their emotional display in an attempt to meet organizationally based expectations specific to their roles. Such expectations determine not only the content and range of emotions to be displayed (Hochschild, 1983), but also the frequency, intensity, and the duration that such emotions should be exhibited (Morris and Feldman, 1996, 1997). Emotional Labor Characteristics According to Hochschild (1983), jobs involving Emotional Labor possess three characteristics: they require the workers to make facial or voice contact with the public, they require the worker to produce an emotional state in the client or customer, and they provide the employer with an opportunity to exert some control over the emotional activities of workers (Hochschild, 1983). Hochschild (1983) argued that service providers and customers share a set of expectations about the nature of emotions that should be displayed during the service encounter. These expectations are a function of societal norms, occupational norms, and organizational norms. Rafaeli and Sutton (1989) and Ekman (1973) referred to such norms as display rules, which are shared expectations about which emotions ought to be expressed and which ought to be disguised (Ekman, 1973)...
eBook - ePub- Scott Harris(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Occupations such as hostesses, cashiers, telemarketers, and hair stylists, come to mind. Or, imagine casino card dealers: these workers engage in friendly conversation for several hours a day as they administer a game that systematically subtracts cash from customers’ wallets (Enarson 1993; Sallaz 2002). People who sell cars, homes, cell phones, shoes, and other products might also engage in a great deal of emotion management (Prus 1989). In addition to customer service and sales jobs, professional occupations also require Emotional Labor: accountants, lawyers, doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, social workers, and teachers all must modify their emotions in order to successfully execute their jobs (e.g., Bellas 1999; Delaney 2012; Erickson and Grove 2008). A professional who displays excessive anger or insufficient sympathy might lose clients or at least gain a bad reputation. It is accurate but somewhat incomplete to define Emotional Labor as being paid to manage one’s own emotions. In a broader sense, the concept of Emotional Labor also draws attention to how workers must work on other people’s feelings as well. Many jobs require laborers to try to keep customers relatively happy or satisfied. Other jobs encourage workers to reduce customers’ fear or anxiety. Imagine the confident yet consoling tone of voice that might be strategically used by nurses, flight attendants, tattoo artists, and tax attorneys. In any of these cases, the Emotional Laborer may go to great lengths not only to manage their own emotions, but to shape the feelings of customers and clients. Co-workers can be targets of emotion management as well. For example, when employees compete with each other for tips, commissions, or compliments from the boss, the “losers” may need to mask their envy while the “winners” suppress the urge to gloat...
- Steven G. Rogelberg(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Part of their job is to produce an emotional state such as happiness or delight in the customer, because with services, much of what the customer is evaluating is intangible. As such, the customer’s affective experience becomes part of his or her evaluation of the organization and its product. Finally, the organization exerts some control over the customer service agent’s emotional display. Employees are often trained on the types of emotions to display, and this behavior is enforced by peers, management, and customers. Emotional Labor is relevant, however, to many jobs that fall outside typical ideas of service work, and not all Emotional Labor is the management and display of positive emotions. Bill collectors and police detectives manage and display negative emotions to produce anxiety, fear, and compliance in debtors and suspects. Funeral directors display warmth and sadness in their job roles. And physicians engage in Emotional Labor by suppressing negative emotions to display the neutrality required of their jobs. In all of these cases, the employee ultimately is managing his or her displayed emotions: expressive behavior including, but not limited to, facial expressions, vocalizations, and posture. This expressive behavior communicates important information to the receiver and can be viewed as a control move, an intentional means of manipulating the situation to produce a desired response in the receiver...
eBook - ePub- Liz Yeomans(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...147). Emotional labour is defined as ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; Emotional Labor [sic] is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value ’ (Hochschild, 1983, p. 7). Hochschild estimated that roughly one-third of American workers had jobs that subjected them to high demands for emotional labour, and that half of all women’s jobs called for it. She identified that the middle classes, especially in Anglo and Northern European cultures, were traditionally socialised for jobs involving a high degree of emotion management. Hochschild (1983) consciously used the term ‘emotional labour’ synonymously with ‘emotion management’ and ‘emotion work’; however these latter terms, according to her footnote on page 7, refer to the management of feeling in the private realm rather than the commercial context: i.e. where there is ‘use value’ or utility instead of ‘exchange value’. ‘Use value’ is not clearly defined but Hochschild appears to suggest that emotion management and emotion work equip the individual with a sense of agency and choice of when to manage emotion in social contexts, whereas emotional labour subjects the individual to an emotional script prescribed by the commercial context. The choice of term, nevertheless, connotes different meanings: for example, Bolton (2005) was criticised by Brook (2009) for preferring the less political term emotion management over emotional labour. Therefore, it is crucial to first examine the genesis of Hochschild’s emotional labour concept before moving on to discuss these different terms, which I return to later in this chapter. Hochschild’s position appears to stem from the first line of the first chapter where she references Das Kapital in which Marx examined the working conditions of child labourers in the nineteenth-century English factories (Hochschild, 1983, pp. 3–5)...
eBook - ePub- Neal M. Ashkanasy, Wilfred J. Zerbe, Charmine E. J. Hartel(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Flight attendants, for example, are supposed to smile at their customers, while funeral directors and police officers and debt collectors need to maintain the appropriate displays of negative emotion. More recently, the concept of Emotional Labor has been extended to include emotional displays by employees within the organization. For example, norms exist as to how employees relate to each other in work and social situations (see Humphrey 2000; Kruml and Geddes 2000). One of the more powerful effects of Emotional Labor concerns what happens when there is a discrepancy between the emotions felt and those that a job requires a worker to display to conform to role expectations. Service workers, in particular, often find themselves in this predicament. Hochschild (1983) coined the term emotional dissonance to characterize this situation. She describes some typical incidents in her analysis of flight attendants, where the attendants were even found to engage in acts of retribution against customers because of the buildup of repressed emotions. Mann (1999) argues that this sort of repressed emotional energy has negative consequences for employees in general. Indeed, Ashkanasy, Fisher, and Härtel (1998) point out that such instances of emotional dissonance constitute affective events, and thus trigger an AET train of reactions, leading eventually to performance outcomes for employees. In this respect, there has been a good deal of attention paid to Emotional Labor and its effects on employee well-being and its consequences for organizational performance (see Schaubroeck and Jones 2000; Tews and Glomb 2000; Wharton and Erickson 1995). From the perspective of the present volume, the implications of Emotional Labor for managing emotions in organizations are clear. This is especially so in the instance of so-called service encounters—where organizational members are providing service directly to the organization’s clients or customers...
eBook - ePubEmotional Labor in the 21st Century
Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work
- Alicia Grandey, James Diefendorff, Deborah E. Rupp, Alicia Grandey, James Diefendorff, Deborah E. Rupp(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This is examined in two broad ways: 1) comparing outcomes for employees in high-EL and low-EL occupations, and 2) comparing financial motives versus other motives for performing emotion work. Hochschild stated that “Emotional Labor is sold for a wage … I use the synonymous terms emotion work or emotion management to refer to these same acts done in a private context” (p. 7). She recognized that emotional displays are used strategically in many social contexts (Goffman, 1959); however, when emotions are used for financial gain “feelings are commoditized” (1979, p. 569), and this has unique effects on the employee. Lively and Powell (2006) found that emotion display requirements were more rigidly held at work (for pay) but this was unrelated to strain; this is in comparison to emotion display requirements held at home, which have, in contrast to Hochschild’s proposal, been argued to be less rigidly held but more contributive to job strain (Wharton & Erickson, 1995). Surprisingly little research has assessed the assumption that performing emotion management for financial gain has personal costs (Wharton, 2009). Across occupations, EL demands are negatively related to wages, except for in professional jobs with higher cognitive demands (Glomb, et al., 2004); thus, the financial outcome of performing EL depends on job status. Financial motives for engaging in EL, however, may depend on the type of occupation. Sociologists have argued that caring professionals have a unique experience with regard to Emotional Labor (see Erickson & Stacey, 2013). Specifically, they are more likely to engage in EL for professional (to uphold professional norms of conduct) or philanthropic (to provide a “gift” to the patient) motives, rather than presentational (to conform to broadly held social norms), or pecuniary (to obtain financial benefits) motives (Bolton & Boyd, 2003)...
eBook - ePubEmotional Labor in Work with Patients and Clients
Effects and Recommendations for Recovery
- Dorota Żołnierczyk-Zreda, Dorota Żołnierczyk-Zreda(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
...H., M. A. Bakerb, and S. K. Murrmann. 2012. When we are onstage, we smile: The effects of Emotional Labor on employee work outcomes. Int J Hosp Manag 31:906–915. Côté, S. 2005. A social interaction model of the effects of emotion regulation on work strain. Acad Manag Rev 30:509–530. Demerouti, E., A. B. Bakker, F. Nachreiner, and W. B. Schaufeli. 2001. The job demands–resources model of burnout. J Appl Psychol 86:499–512. Diefendorff, J. M., and R. H. Gosserand. 2003. Understanding the emotional labour process: A control theory perspective. J Organ Behav 24:945–959. Diefendorff, J. M., E. M. Richard, and M. H. Croyle. 2006. Are emotional display rules formal job requirements? Examination of employee and supervisor perceptions. J Occup Organ Psychol 79):273–298. Dormann, C., and D. Zapf. 2004. Customer-related social stressors and burnout. J Occup Health Psychol 9:61–82. Grandey, A. A., J. M. Diefendorff, and D. E. Rupp. 2012. Emotional Labor in the 21st Century: Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work. New York: Routledge. Grandey, A., and G. M. Sayre. 2019. Emotional Labor: Regulating emotions for a wage. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 28(2):096372141881277. Hobfoll, S. E. 1998. Stress, Culture and Community: The Psychology and Philosophy of Stress. New York: Plenum. Hochschild, A. R. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hockey, G. J. 1997. Compensatory control in the regulation of human performance under stress and high workload: A cognitive-energetical framework. Biol Psychol 45:73–93. Holman, D., D. Martinez-Iñigo, and P. Totterdell. 2008. Emotional Labor and employee well-being: An integrative review. In Research Companion to Emotion in Organizations, eds. N. M. Ashkanasy, and C. L. Cooper, 301–315. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Hülsheger, U. R., and A. F. Schewe. 2011...
