Emotional labor

Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job.^[1][2] More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their personas during interactions with customers, co-workers, clients, and managers. This 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. This is done so as to produce a certain feeling in the customer or client that will allow the company or organization to succeed.^[1]

Roles that have been identified as requiring emotional labor include those involved in

1. require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public.
2. require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person.
3. allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of employees.[1]

Hochschild (1983) argues that within this commodification process, service workers are estranged from their own feelings in the workplace.^[1]

Alternate usage

The term has been applied in modern contexts to refer to household tasks, specifically unpaid labor that is often expected of women, e.g. having to remind their partner of chores.^[5] The term can also refer to informal counseling, such as providing advice to a friend or helping someone through a breakup.^[6] When Hochschild was interviewed about this shifting usage, she described it having undergone concept creep, expressing that it made the concept blurrier and was sometimes being applied to things that were simply just labor, although how carrying out this labor made a person feel could make it emotional labor as well.^[7]

Determinants

1. Societal, occupational, and organizational
   empirical evidence indicates that in typically "busy" stores there is more legitimacy to express negative emotions than there is in typically "slow" stores, in which employees are expected to behave in accordance with the display rules.^[8] Hence, the emotional culture to which one belongs influences the employee's commitment to those rules.^[9]
2. self-identity), which allows them to express the organizationally-desired emotions more easily (because there is less discrepancy between expressed behavior and emotional experience when engaged in their work).^[11]
3. Supervisory regulation of display rules; Supervisors are likely to be important definers of display rules at the job level, given their direct influence on workers' beliefs about high-performance expectations. Moreover, supervisors' impressions of the need to suppress negative emotions on the job influence the employees' impressions of that display rule.[12]

Surface and deep acting

Arlie Hochschild's foundational text divided emotional labor into two components: surface acting and deep acting.^[1] Surface acting occurs when employees display the emotions required for a job without changing how they actually feel.^[1] Deep acting is an effortful process through which employees change their internal feelings to align with organizational expectations, producing more natural and genuine emotional displays.^[13] Although the underlying processes differ, the objective of both is typically to show positive emotions, which are presumed to impact the feelings of customers and bottom-line outcomes (e.g. sales, positive recommendations, and repeat business).^[13][14][15] However, research generally has shown surface acting is more harmful to employee health.^[16][17][18] Without a consideration of ethical values, the consequences of emotional work on employees can easily become negative. Business ethics can be used as a guide for employees on how to present feelings that are consistent with ethical values, and can show them how to regulate their feelings more easily and comfortably while working.^[19]

Careers

In the past, emotional labor demands and display rules were viewed as a characteristic of particular

Zang et al. (2019) looked at teachers in China, using questionnaires the researchers asked about their teaching experience and their interaction with the children and their families.[20] According to numerous studies, early childhood education is important to a child's development, which can have an effect on the teachers emotional labor, along with their emotional labor having an effect on the children. A big focus in this study was the use of surface acting in early childhood teacher. Zang et al. (2019) found that surface acting was used significantly less than deep and natural acting in kindergarten teachers, along with early childhood teacher are less likely to fake or suppress their feelings. They also found that more experienced teachers had higher levels of emotional labor, because they either have more skills to suppress their emotions, or they are less driven to use surface acting.

Bill collectors

In 1991, Sutton did an in-depth

Bill collectors' emotional labor consists of not letting angry and hostile debtors make them angry and to not feel guilty about pressuring friendly debtors for money.[21] They coped with angry debtors by publicly showing their anger or making jokes when they got off the phone.^[21] They minimized the guilt they felt by staying emotionally detached from the debtors.^[21]

Childcare workers

The skills involved in childcare are often viewed as innate to women, making the components of childcare invisible.^[22][23] However, a number of scholars have not only studied the difficulty and skill required for childcare, but also suggested that the emotional labor of childcare is unique and needs to be studied differently.^{[23][24][25][26]} Performing emotional labor requires the development of emotional capital, and that can only be developed through experience and reflection.^[24] Through semi-structured interviews, Edwards (2016) found that there were two components of emotional labor in childcare in addition to Hochschild's original two: emotional consonance and suppression.^[1][26] Edwards (2016) defined suppression as hiding emotion and emotional consonance as naturally experiencing the same emotion that one is expected to feel for the job.^[26]

Food-industry workers

Wait staff

In her 1991 study of

By using participant observation and interviews, Leidner (1993) examines how employers in fast food restaurants regulate workers' interactions with customers.^[29] According to Leidner (1993), employers attempt to regulate workers' interactions with customers only under certain conditions. Specifically, when employers attempt to regulate worker–customer interactions, employers believe that "the quality of the interaction is important to the success of the enterprise", that workers are "unable or unwilling to conduct the interactions appropriately on their own", and that the "tasks themselves are not too complex or context-dependent."^[29] According to Leidner (1993), regulating employee interactions with customers involves standardizing workers' personal interactions with customers. At the McDonald's fast food restaurants in Leidner's (1993) study, these interactions are strictly scripted, and workers' compliance with the scripts and regulations are closely monitored.^[29]

Along with examining employers' attempts to regulate employee–customer interactions, Leidner (1993) examines how fast-food workers' respond to these regulations.

Many scholars argue that the amount of emotional work required between all levels of government is greatest on the local level. It is at the level of cities and counties that the responsibility lies for day to day emergency preparedness, firefighters, law enforcement, public education, public health, and family and children's services. Citizens in a community expect the same level of satisfaction from their government, as they receive in a customer service-oriented job. This takes a considerate amount of work for both employees and employers in the field of public administration. Mastracci and Adams (2017) looks at public servants and how they may be at risk of being alienated because of their unsupported emotional labor demands from their jobs. This can cause surface acting and distrust in management.^[32] There are two comparisons that represent emotional labor within public administration, "Rational Work versus Emotion Work", and "Emotional Labor versus Emotional Intelligence."^[33]

Performance

Many scholars argue that when public administrators perform emotional labor, they are dealing with significantly more sensitive situations than employees in the service industry. The reason for this is because they are on the front lines of the government, and are expected by citizens to serve them quickly and efficiently. When confronted by a citizen or a co-worker, public administrators use emotional sensing to size up the emotional state of the citizen in need. Workers then take stock of their own emotional state in order to make sure that the emotion they are expressing is appropriate to their roles. Simultaneously, they have to determine how to act in order to elicit the desired response from the citizen as well as from co-workers. Public Administrators perform emotional labor through five different strategies: Psychological First Aid, Compartments and Closets, Crazy Calm, Humor, and Common Sense.^[34]

Definition: rational work vs. emotion work

According to Mary Guy, Public administration does not only focus on the business side of administration but on the personal side as well. It is not just about collecting the water bill or land ordinances to construct a new property, it is also about the quality of life and sense of community that is allotted to individuals by their city officials. Rational work is the ability to think cognitively and analytically, while emotional work means to think more practically and with more reason.^[35]

Definition: intelligence vs. emotional intelligence

Knowing how to suppress and manage one's own feelings is known as emotional intelligence. The ability to control one's emotions and to be able to do this at a high level guarantees one's own ability to serve those in need. Emotional intelligence is performed while performing emotional labor, and without one the other can not be there.^[36]

Gender

Macdonald and Sirianni (1996) use the term "emotional proletariat" to describe service jobs in which "workers exercise emotional labor wherein they are required to display friendliness and deference to customers."^[37] Because of deference, these occupations tend to be stereotyped as female jobs, independent of the actual number of women working the job. According to Macdonald and Sirianni (1996), because deference is a characteristic demanded of all those in disadvantaged structural positions, especially women, when deference is made a job requirement, women are likely to be overrepresented in these jobs. Macdonald and Sirianni (1996) claim that "[i]n no other area of wage labor are the personal characteristics of the workers so strongly associated with the nature of the work."^[37] Thus, according to Macdonald and Sirianna (1996), although all workers employed within the service economy may have a difficult time maintaining their dignity and self-identity due to the demands of emotional labor, such an issue may be especially problematic for women workers.^[37]

Emotional labor also affects women by perpetuating

Disability

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People with disability are increasingly part of the labor force, due to societal attitudes about inclusion and neoliberal pressures around reducing welfare. Roles that require emotional labor may be more difficult for people with certain kinds of disabilities to perform. Additionally, workplaces may require workers with disability to downplay their impairments in order to 'fit in', an extra burden of emotional labor.[40]

Implications

Positive affective display in service interactions, such as

There is empirical evidence that higher levels of emotional labor demands are not uniformly rewarded with higher wages. Rather, the reward is dependent on the level of general cognitive demands required by the job. That is, occupations with high cognitive demands evidence wage returns with increasing emotional labor demands; whereas occupations low in cognitive demands evidence a wage "penalty" with increasing emotional labor demands.[44] Additionally, innovations that increase employee empowerment — such as conversion into worker cooperatives, co-managing schemes, or flattened workplace structures — have been found to increase workers’ levels of emotional labor as they take on more workplace responsibilities.^[45]

Coping skills

References