Emotional Labor

845 Words2 Pages

Concerning the consequences of engaging on emotional labour, Hochschild (1983) highlights the improvement of customer service as the best positive outcome. Regarding negative consequences the need to express the right emotion at the right moment is considered, by Hochschild (1983), as highly demanding in terms of emotional control. Furthermore, she suggests that when the employees have the perception that the organization is controlling the expression of their emotions, they may feel that the barrier between the individual and the organization is surpassed, which can be very disagreeable to the employees, leading consequently to burnout, job stress and health problems.
According to Hochschild (1983), before engaging on emotional labour individuals …show more content…

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 …show more content…

Following this line of though, if for an employee expressing the right emotion at the right time is easy and effortless, if that leads to a good reaction in the person with whom he is interacting, leading, in turn, to a good performance and a reward from the organization, then the employee will feel valued and rewarded. However, if the employee has to make a considerable effort to express the right emotion, the person with whom he is interacting will see that his expression is not sincere and this may hinder the employee effectiveness when conducting a task (Grandey,

Open Document