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 thi...