Emotional Labor in the Workplace

Emotional Labor in the Workplace
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Emotional Labor at Workplace
Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of the job. In the workplace, the workers are required to control their emotions when they are interacting with their coworkers, customers, and seniors. Arlie Hochschild developed the concept of emotional labor in 1983 in the description of the things that the services workers do at the workplace that are beyond the physical and mental duties (Hochschild, 2011). Therefore, workers are supposed to manage their emotions while at work, which includes the analysis and decision making regarding motion expression. The process of managing emotional labor is important as it will influence the professionalism of a person as well as contact with customers and superiors. It is at this point where this paper seeks to understand the concept of emotional labor in different workplace settings and how it can be managed to improve the performance of the workers.
Emotional labor occurs in the workplace when employees have to compartmentalize their emotions when working. For example, the employees at the customer care services may be forced to remain calm while they are serving the customers who may be shouting at them. The workers have to calm down and handle their emotions outside the workplace.
How Emotional Labor Affect Workers
When a worker engages in emotional labor, manages the feelings and can fulfill the objectives of the organization. Therefore, most of the workers express their positive feelings or hide their negative feelings (Raval, & Dourish, 2016). To handle the negative emotions, employees tend to do the following: they often show the emotions they do not feel; they hide the emotions they feel. Create the emotions that rhyme with the situation. For a worker to effectively control the emotions, can apply the emotional labor techniques. One of them is surface acting. This is where the worker fakes or pretends to have an emotion through artificial body language and verbal communication. For example, smiling and use of the soft tone of voice will help the worker to show the emotions that are not felt. Another technique is deep acting. This is where the employee directs the internal emotions and directs them to believe that the worker is feeling happy and is contented with the interaction with the other people.
In most cases, the worker needs to show the emotions that are in line with the job and ignore the real emotions, but it can result to emotional conflict between the real emotions and the one that is expressed. Some researchers argue that emotional conflict can lead to emotional exhaustion as well as the burnout of the workers. The continuous hiding of the person’s emotions can result in high levels of stress and sometimes disconnection from close personal relations. However, other researchers have not found any link between emotional conflict and emotional exhaustion. A common theory to explain the contradiction in the research findings is that people have different ways of dealing with inauthentic emotional expressions. Some employees cope with the organization’s values of positive communication, and this makes them well prepared to express the appropriate emotions. Also, cheerful workers can hide the negative emotions are compared to others (Griffin, & Moorhead, 2011). Recognition of different social situations by the workers and behaving appropriately will help them manage the emotional labor. Workers with negative personalities and low social awareness will have it difficult to handle the emotional conflict, and they tend to experience emotional exhaustion easily.
Emotional Labor Costs
Workers that have worked in the customer-service potion are aware of how difficult it can sometimes be to control emotions in the front of the hungry client (Hwa, 2012). Sometimes the effort may be more costly than people realize. For the employees that work in a stressful work environment, the consequences of emotional labor can create internal disorder. In one research, Grandey and collaborators simulated a call center where the Confederates on the opposite end were either rude or polite. The test participants were instructed to be friendly, so they regulated their emotions. However, it was evident that the participants made more performance errors in math calculations.
Furthermore, the employees that dealt with the abusive worker made more mistakes. The research discovered that it requires attention to regulate one's emotions. Therefore, for the workers that are regulating their emotions, they do not have some resources to perform other tasks. It explains why the employees that responded to the abusive customers made more math errors.
Individual Stress Management
Most interventions that aim to reduce the risks that are associated with the stress in the workplace engage individual and organizational approaches. Some of the worker management of the stress includes seeking services such as occupation, clinical and health counseling (Walsh, & Bartikowski, 2013). Such services are meant to change the worker's skills and resources for them to alter their situation. Workers can undertake a variety of training courses that will help them to develop coping approaches such as problem-solving, time management, communication skills, and effective management. However, in organizations, workers are subjected to many sources of stress that they cannot control. The stressors include the culture of the organization and style of management. The stress techniques that aim to change the workers, but the failure to address the causes of the stress are less effective.
Organization Stress Management
Management and prevention of the workplace stress require the interventions of the organization since most of the stress is created by the organization (Walsh, & Bartikowski, 2013). It is advisable that the organization develop the techniques that will help to control the causes of the stress and not focus only on helping the workers that are affected by the stress. Organizations can intervene in stress management ranging from structural change to employing psychological measures.
Emotional Labor across Professions and Gender
It is worth noting that emotional labor is a job trait, a feature of a role, but not the trait of the person who fills the role. Most of the public service jobs call for substantial emotional labor. Both the experienced and new employees involved in emotional labor with equal exertion (Torland, 2011). The intensity, as well as the frequency of the emotional labor, varies from one job to another and th...