Emotional Labor

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What is Emotional Labor?
Emotional Labor is the suppression of an individual inner feeling and alter the outward behavior or inner feeling to display the appropriate emotion (Chu, 2002). This means that the individual will suppress their true emotions and only display emotions that are in accordance to both social and workplace norm.

Emotional Labor
The term “Emotional Labor” was first coined by Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983) in her book titled ‘the managed heart”. She defined emotional labor as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value”. This definition explained that a person will suppress his or her inner emotions and deliberately …show more content…

‘Feeling rules’ or also known as ‘display rules’ (Ashford and Humphrey, 1993) described Hochschild 1983, is like a script, with the appropriate response that the employee will employ to handle different situations.

Employee have a set of feeling rules which guide their behaviours at the workplace. For example, in a service industry, the service interaction between the employee and the customer is the core selling point for most service industries and also served as the basis of the customer’s perception on the quality of service experienced. Employees know that they are expected to mask their felt emotions and display positive emotions such as friendliness, enthusiasm, or confidence.

Hoschild used the example of the airline attendant to illustrate the point on ‘feeling rules’. When the airline attendant encountered a demanding or disorderly customer, he or she will have to remain calm, polite, and maintain a smiling face while coping with the situation, even if it means that he or she is likely to be irked by the customer’s behavior.This is a form of self control - suppressing negative emotion and invoking positive emotions, is seen as emotional

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