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
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‘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
The key success to any business transaction is customer satisfaction. A customer always demands the best service and in return offers the company their loyalty. The key to this; great customer service. Smile at the customer, speak to them with a polite tone, and adjust your body language to make it friendly and approachable; all these are related to the concept of emotional labour. Emotional labour proposes that in order to ensure customer satisfaction is achieved, it is vital for “managers or employers to regulate or manage employee’s behaviour or emotional expressions to ensure service quality” (Chu 2002). The concept of emotional labour was first developed by Arlie Hochschild, who was an organizational sociologist. Hochschild stated that if an employee was employed in a service field, then it would be required from the employee to “to display specific sets of emotions (both verbal and non-verbal) with the aim of inducing particular feelings and responses among those for whom the service is being provided”(Hochschild 1983).
Plato, a famous philosopher in the early ages, described emotion and reason as two horses pulling an individual in opposite directions. Often emotion is a form of automatic action, and reason is a form of controlled action, where thought processes occur before action takes place. However, reason cannot control emotions. A huge factor is that emotions are an outlet of inner emotions. People often don’t cry when they feel joyful deep inside. Some people might be acting, but actions and small details often portray the emotions hidden inside. People...
The situation in which I will be referring to throughout this essay is a family dinner celebrating my brother’s engagement to his fiancé whom my mother approves of but my father does not. The works of Arlie Hochschild on emotional work will be used to analyze the situational context. Arlie Hochschild is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley whose area of interest is in how individuals manage their emotions and perform emotional labor in places that require control over one’s character such as their workplace. Her work suggests the idea that emotion and feeling are social. In this Hochschild (1983) means that there are rules to how we feel in every situation such as birthday parties and trying to stay happy at them or funerals and being expected to express emotions of grief. An individual may engage in emotional work by changing their affective state to match the feeling rules of the situation, Hochschild (1983) refers to this as two concepts: surface acting and deep acting.
The perils of the Ponca Indians and the trials they experienced during the governments removal program of the 1800s gives a bleak and painful look America’s past. It is through the gripping tale of Chief Standing Bear that we learn about the displacement of an indigenous tribe who was forcibly displaced from their land, family and livelihood. Through his lens we feel the pains of a leader who is unable to protect his people and his stripped of his rights to lay them to rest. Perhaps, what we learn is not only about the past; it is a study that foreshadows our present. The broken trust of the American people has not fully resolved the shameful atrocities that were hurled upon our brethren only a century ago.
Emotional experiences underlie society and provide the sustenance necessary to maintain social cohesion. The social feelings of reverence create the group bonds that tie the individual to society. Now that the relationship between emotions and society has been explicated, it begs the question as to how this relationship applies to life today. Can society function even without the primitive rites of corroborees? Have corroborees faded out of modern times, or have they simply manifested themselves in new forms, such as sporting events and raves? Whatever the case may be, the emotional aspect of humanity cannot be neglected, for it represents the glue that holds society together.
Emotional regimes and emotional communities are a part of all societies both in the past and the present and as such, the analysis of both is crucial in understanding the culture and motives of the societies. Moreover, the comparison of the theories, noting the differences, can further enhance one’s understanding of societies, thus making these theories a valuable tool for
Introduction Emotional Labor (EL) is defined “as managing emotions through surface or deep acting by following organizational display rules in return for a wage.” (Hochschild 1983). Task performance and strategy is increased through EL and it has impact on administration of service. Strategies displayed by frontline staffs in service roles may increase bad outcomes by activating negative idea like emotive dissonance and self-alienation.
Rosen, L. D., Cheever, N. A., Cummings, C., & Felt, J. (2008). The impact of emotionality and
Emotional labor takes empathy. Emotional management is how we practice emotional labor. It is our ability to manage our internal feelings in a way that creates the response we want from another. We do this by suppressing the wrong emotions for the situation so we can put on a mask of controlled expression. There is a hypothesis that women are better than men at service-oriented jobs that require emotional labor.
During the late 1960s, air stewardess had the connotation that they are not just for providing food and beverage service. The advertisements of airline industries had made the flight attendants highly eroticized and an object of aesthetic and sex appeal. Needless to say, most of the passengers expected to be presented with feminine bravado (Tiemeyer, 2007). Almost all of the airlines had the female-only policy when hiring flight attendants. By 1960s, the population of males in the industry of flight attendants were just four percent.
High emotional intelligence can improve work performance and its varied aspects can contribute to work differently. One aspect of emotion...
Emotions play an essential role in our everyday lives and the majority of individuals are not consciously aware about it. Based on how someone’s emotions are for that day, depends on what kind of day that person will have. In essence, the person’s day is impacted by their emotions. The question whether or not a person can control their emotions voluntarily varies from person to person. In some cases, people are able to handle their emotions depending on the situation they're in. For instance, a person cannot lash out on another person because it is not socially acceptable. However, some people do and let their emotions get the better of them. The controlling of one’s emotion is known as emotional regulation. Emotional regulation is the ability
Individuals behave in a given manner based not on the way their external environment actually is but, rather, on what they see or believe it to be. An organization may spend millions of dollars to create a pleasant work environment for its employees. However, in spite of these expenditures, if an employee believes that his or her job that assigned to them is lousy and feel unsatisfactory, that employee will behave accordingly.
They defined emotional labour as “the act of displaying appropriate emotion (i.e., conforming with a display rule)”, hence the main goal of engaging in emotional labour, by expressing what are considered appropriate emotions in the workplace, is to participate in a method of impression controlling for the organization (Zapf, 2002). When comparing Ashforth and Humphrey’s (1993) perspective with Hochschild’s (1983), it may be concluded that the former is more focused on the act of expressing an emotion rather than the control of an individual’s feelings before engaging in a specific behaviour. In fact, this perspective does not give much importance to the emotional regulation methods of surface and deep acting as source of ill-being in the workplace, since when employees engage in emotional labour it may not signify that they are doing a conscious
Mayer and Salovey (2001) maintained that emotions help prioritise, decide, anticipate and plan one’s actions. In order to effectively manage one’s emotions, one must first learn to identify and recognise them accurately. They should not neglect their emotions as this will reflect lack of self-awareness. For example, when someone lost their loved ones, they choose to be in a state of denial allowing themselves to be drowned in depression and sickness. They refused to get away from feeling negative and find solutions to overcome their emotions. These group of people face difficulties in recognising, identifying and managing their emotions.