Emotional Labor

Putting the Service in Public Service

Mary E. Guy, Meredith A. Newman, Sharon H. Mastracci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317472094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Most public service jobs require interpersonal contact that is either face-to-face or voice-to-voice - relational work that goes beyond testable job skills but is essential for job completion. This unique book focuses on this emotional labor and what it takes to perform it.The authors weave a powerful narrative of stories from the trenches gleaned through interviews, focus groups, and survey data. They go beyond the veneer of service delivery to the real, live, person-to-person interactions that give meaning to public service.For anyone who has ever felt apathetic toward government work, the words of caseworkers, investigators, administrators, attorneys, correctional staff, and 9/11 call-takers all show the human dimension of bureaucratic work and underscore what it means to work "with feeling."

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Emotional Labor and Public Service

This book is about public service and what it takes to perform it. Many, if not most, public service jobs require interpersonal contact that is either face-to-face or voice-to-voice. Those who staff the counter at the driver’s license examining station are expected to greet the 100th applicant of the day with the same sincerity as they greeted the first. Those who staff the phone lines for the Social Security Administration are expected to be “nicer than nice.” Caseworkers must care about strangers, and inspectors who work for planning and zoning departments are required to treat each aggravated homeowner with fairness and courtesy. In the aftermath of a hurricane, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials must address not only physical disaster but emotionally traumatized citizens. This work is relational in nature and is called emotional labor. Such work “greases the wheels” so that people cooperate, stay on task, and work well together. It is essential for job completion and is a prerequisite for quality public service.

A generation ago, Peter Drucker called attention to the fact that the future workplace would be staffed not by manual laborers but by knowledge workers. Long before other sectors of the economy came to appreciate the centrality of knowledge work, public service organizations routinely relied on this new type of worker. There is no quarrel that the preponderance of the public work force consists of knowledge workers. The dimension that is missing from discussions of government’s human capital is the importance of emotion work, or emotional labor.

For too long, the emphasis on tangible, testable skills has “disappeared” emotional labor—that work which goes beyond cognitive, physical, or mechanical skills but is required for job completion. The result is that agencies adopt the rhetoric of service but end up disappearing the very action that is essential between citizen and worker. Trapped in the canon of scientific management, notions of organizational effectiveness fail to account for the centrality of emotion work even when it is directly related to organizational goals. The following excerpts from interviews provide examples:

Police dispatchers answer calls from citizens who are in dire straits. They must manage their own emotions as well as those of the person at the other end of the telephone line. A 911 call taker explains:

We don’t get people who call up and say, “Oh, I’m happy. You’re doing a wonderful job.” We talk to people at their absolute worst, on probably the worst day of their life. They can cuss and swear, and we’re not allowed to cuss and swear back. There are days that you’d like to, but you can’t. Our job is to get the information and get an officer to the scene of an accident or crime or fire. So, it is difficult.

Most human service professionals work in public service rather than in for-profit businesses. Their work is different from that required in market-based occupations. In the words of another 911 call taker:,

I mean everybody talks a lot about closure. I think if your job is other people’s grief or other people’s pain, you don’t necessarily get to have closure with that. You don’t have some resolution of the issue. You just carry it around with you everywhere.

Although emotion work is intense, it is also energizing. A social worker at the Office of the Public Guardian tells us,

People tease me and they say, ‘You look exhausted,” but I smile. It’s because I really believe I am making a huge difference in these children’s lives. I’m almost reenergized. I mean, it’s like there’s a re-energy that comes from this positive feedback that I get.

We want to open a dialogue about emotional labor in public service and to clarify and illuminate its characteristics, subtleties, and centrality. To this end, the book presents the substance of emotion work through the words of practitioners who exercise these skills daily. Survey data are used to show the larger picture of how it affects job satisfaction on the upside and burnout on the downside. We close with a discussion of how this subject informs the practice of public service and how it affects human capital.

What Is Emotional Labor?

First, to the point: What is emotional labor? It is a component of the dynamic relationship between two people: worker and citizen or worker and worker. Emotional labor shares similarities as well as differences with physical labor—both require skill and experience and are subject to external controls and divisions of labor. The English language comes up short when we try to describe it. A number of terms capture one aspect or more, but none captures its entirety. For example, the list below names some of the dimensions to emotional labor. Some jobs require workers to exercise several of these; others require the performance of none, one, or only a few:

•Verbal judo: used in law enforcement to describe “tough talk” banter

•Caritas: captures the caring function in human services

•Game face: used in law enforcement to signify displays of toughness

•Compassion fatigue: used in social work to describe burnout resulting from too much caritas

•Emotion management: focuses on the worker’s job of eliciting the desired emotional response from the citizen

•Professional face: used to describe the status shield that workers don to distance themselves emotionally from the interaction; it is a role-playing function.

•Show time: similar to game face

•Deep acting: refers to convincingly pretending to feel a given emotion

•Emotional chameleon: the ability to switch expressions of emotions on and off

•Good cop, bad cop: role playing in which one worker pretends to be sympathetic while the other pretends to be tougher than tough

•Spider sense: the ability to intuit the other’s emotional state

•Rapport: the ability to establish a deep understanding and communication with the other

•Stage left: refers to playacting in expressing an emotion, as if on stage Emotional suppression: that which is required to disregard one’s own feelings

•Emotional mirror: the ability to reflect and adopt the emotions of the other

•Emotional armor: the ability to gird oneself against one’s own emotional response

•Emotional equilibrium: refers to maintaining a balance between extremes of emotion

•Emotional teflon: the ability to protect oneself from an emotional reaction

•Emotional anesthesia: the lack of any emotional response; may occur after prolonged exposure to extreme emotional stimuli

•Emotional engagement: the ability to connect with the other and empathize

•Emotional mask: that which results when workers convincingly suppress their own emotions in order to act as if they feel a contradictory emotion, or no emotion

•Emotional façade: the ability to express an emotion one does not actually feel

As the list shows, there are a variety of dimensions that attach to emotional labor. Although some workers can don emotional armor and endure emotionally draining experiences, others cannot. Although some are energized by emotional encounters, others find them exhausting. Whereas some are skilled at emotional suppression, others excel at developing rapport and emotional engagement. This is our point: Emotion work is as individual as cognitive work. It is a skill and is subject to individual differences.

Definition

Any definition of emotional labor begins with the seminal work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983). Hochschild uses the term to mean “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” intended to produce a particular state of mind in others; “emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value” (1983, p. 7). Emotional labor is a “gesture in a social exchange; it has a function there and is not to be understood merely as a facet of personality” (Hochschild 1979, p. 568). In other words, the worker must perform the work in order to complete the job; it is a type of labor.

Related Terms

Two related terms are germane to this definition. First is the term emotion work. Hochschild differentiates between emotional labor and emotion work, treating labor as that action that is required by an employer and work as the nature of the action itself. To put it differently, to perform emotion work, one must expend emotional labor. This differentiation is slim and nuanced. You will see the terms used in this manner through the chapters.

Emotion work becomes a public act, “bought on the one hand and sold on the other” (Hochschild 1983, p. 118). It requires that workers suppress their private feelings in order to show the “desirable” work-related emotion. In other words, the focus is on an emotional performance that is bought and sold as a commodity. Another way to look at the subject is to think of emotional labor as that work that is performed under the direction of someone else. Emotion work, on the other hand, is the performance of emotional labor at one’s own discretion (Tolich 1993). The distinction here is who controls the performance. If it is regulated by the employer, it is defined as emotional labor, and if it results from the autonomous choice of the employee, then it is emotion work. We will examine feedback from employees in Chapter 8 indicating that emotion work is energizing and gives meaning to one’s work. These findings point to emotional labor and emotion work as multidimensional phenomena.

The second term is emotional intelligence, the ability to manage one’s own emotions and to sense those of others. Knowledge born of this intelligence is used to govern one’s actions. Just as with cognitive intelligence, there are gradations in skill. Suppressing or managing one’s own feelings requires sophisticated skill levels, for example. Related competencies include self-awareness, self-control, empathy, active listening, and the skill to resolve conflicts and cooperate with others.

Emotional Labor Versus Cognitive Work

Cognitive skills and emotion work skills are separate but related dimensions for successful job performance. The former includes the application of factual knowledge to the intellectual analysis of problems and rational decision making. The latter includes analysis and decision making in terms of the expression of emotion, whether actually felt or not, as well as its opposite: the suppression of emotions that are felt but not expressed. More specifically, emotional labor comes into play during communication between worker and citizen, and it requires the rapid-fire execution of

1. Emotive sensing, which means detecting the affective state of the other and using that information to array one’s own alternatives in terms of how to respond

2. Analyzing one’s own affective state and comparing it to that of the other

3. Judging how alternative responses will affect the other, then selecting the best alternative

4. Behaving, such that the worker suppresses or expresses an emotion—in order to elicit a desired response from the other.

In sum, service exchanges between worker and citizen require the worker to sense the right tone and medium for expressing a point and/or feeling and then to determine whether, when, and how to act on that analysis. To ignore this combination of analysis, affect, judgment, and communication is to ignore the “social lube” that enables rapport, elicits desired responses, and ensures that interpersonal transactions are constructive.

Too often dismissed as “nurturant” or “supportive,” emotion work has traditionally been thought to be something that women do naturally. With this in mind, emotion work is not delineated in job descriptions, nor is it compensated. It is, instead, treated as a “comes with” for many—if not most—jobs that disproportionately employ women. This view is too narrow. Police officers and prison guards will tell you that they engage in emotion work every day, but at the other extreme. Rather than being nurturing and gentle, their jobs require them to wear a gameface, to act tougher than they actually feel, to engage in verbal judo with law breakers. Neither extreme of emotional labor will be found in job descriptions. Only the cognitive skills will be listed. Why?

Emotional Labor as Work

The commonly accepted notion of work is rarely examined. Such neglect has become its own straitjacket as it led to disregard for any labor other than that which is physical or cognitive. This ideology of work is buttressed by four institutional forces, each of which conceals, rather than reveals, emotion work. First, the civil service is built on a foundation of formal descriptions that specify tangible elements of each job. Though reforms have been introduced over the years, the basic understanding of what does, and does not, constitute “skill” remains mired in the empirical tradition—that if it is tangible and measurable, it exists, and if it is not, then it is dismissed.

The discounting of emotion work and the elevation of observable work results in the disappearance of emotional labor skills from job descriptions, performance appraisal, and reward systems. By way of contrast, our lack of attention to emotional labor parallels the lack of attention across the social sciences to that which defies measurement. The fields of sociology, political science, and psychology through the latter half of the twentieth century benefited immeasurably from computerization. The growing convenience of data collection and statistical analysis led social scientists to focus almost solely on variables that lent themselves to empirical observation and quantification. Trapped in this cascade, researchers found themselves swept downstream, measuring that which could be counted and observing that which could be seen. In human resources (HR) circles, the trend resulted in “objectively” defining skills, knowledge, and abilities; constructing tests and measurements to assess these; and writing performance appraisal instruments that would allow supervisors to “fairly and objectively” assess each worker’s performance on a Likert scale. Such a scale is itself an attempt to “objectify” qualitative assessment.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Emotional Labor and Public Service
• 2. The Disconnect Between Public Administration Theory and Practice
• 3. Governance, Demanding Publics, and Citizen Satisfaction
• 4. I’ll Know It When I See It: Emotional Labor, Verbal Judo, and Artful Affect
• 5. Burnout Versus Making a Difference:The Costs and Benefits of Emotion Work
• 6. Do Human Resource Practices Recognize Emotional Labor?
• 7. Pay Inequity as the Penalty for Emotion Work
• 8. Emotion Work Present and Future:Trends in Relational Occupations
• 9. Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice
• Appendix A. GNM Emotional Labor Questionnaire
• Appendix B. Research Design
• Appendix C. Variables for Regression Analysis
• Appendix D. Emotional Labor Scales
• Appendix E. Description of Job Occupants
• Appendix F. Factors Used in Analysis
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors