Emotional labor: definition, impacts, and workplace applications

Emotional Labor

The concept of emotional labor first came from a book written by a.R. Hochschild and in that he described the concept of emotional labor. The name of the book was "The Managed Heart." According to his definition it was the management of feeling by individuals to contain their emotions and feelings to create an outwardly visible facial and bodily display. This is now very important for persons who always have to keep direct contact with the outside public and be of service to them. Their facial expressions bring about changes in feelings in the other individual's emotions. This also helps the management or employer to directly fix up emotions that their employees have to demonstrate to the public. Often this involves only adjusting facial expressions, but sometimes requires changing the actual emotions that are occurring in the individual. One of the first areas that this was seen was for nursing employees, but has now spread to a lot of employees. These individuals are generally in low positions in the company hierarchies, and are yet the persons who meet the visitors to the organizations.

The techniques are seen to be useful in employees like retail clerks, secretaries, flight attendants, lady lawyers dealing with other lawyers, and health care professionals including doctors. There is a high cost that has to be paid by these individuals and the major part of it is probably in terms of expenditure on heart diseases, and this has amounted to more than $130 billion even in 1995. The concept is not only fertile imagination of people, but has been confirmed through research by individuals. The only unknown is in the fact that the concept is new and probably we do not know all individuals who face it. If it is known that some individuals have personal emotional problems, then the situation at work may interfere with their emotions. Let us take the example of a lady who has lost her child due to an unfortunate illness working in a situation where there are normally no children, but due to some reason, a child arrives there. Will she have problems in emotional control or not?

Comments and Analysis:

It has been seen that emotional control techniques are of great help to retail clerks, secretaries, flight attendants and many other service workers in dealing with the public who sometimes become difficult to handle. So far as the employers are concerned, it helps in great improvement of the bottom line. The general law of the service being extended to customers with a smile is given by most employers, and this is very helpful to the customers, but becomes a cause for great strain among the employees. They become emotionally and physically strained and more so when the smile does not come naturally as is the case some of the time. This is the opinion of a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at Penn State University. There are already a lot of stresses at the clerical and service jobs. The stress arises due to the low wages that they get and the low status that they have in the hierarchy, and they also have little, if any, control over the place that they work in. When they have to maintain positive expressions due to professional reasons, it becomes additional work for them, and this is termed as emotional labor by psychologists. (Emotional Labor Stresses Employees)

This leads to additional stress and is reflected in mental and physical costs. This stress is not reflected only in terms of absenteeism, decrease in productivity, fatigue or burnout. These emotions are psychologically bottled up and they cause trouble by getting the cardiovascular and nervous systems to work overtime and also make the immune system weak. According to research, this has been seen to lead to a number of physical illnesses and those include high blood pressure, heart disease and even cancer. According to estimates of the American Heart Association, the cost of heart diseases is estimated to be more than $130 billion in 1995. The inability to express emotions is one of the direct predictions of cancer. The cost figure given above includes the cost of health care, lost productivity and replacement of employees. (Emotional Labor Stresses Employees)

Thus the emotional inhibition is a direct contributor to the result of stress and this means that there has to be greater attention that is paid to the requirements of emotional labor and also the methods through which the employees suppress their emotions. The problem here is that most of the time the employees are told directly to forget about their emotions or ignore them so that a good service can be provided to the customer. This causes problems when the person has a jarring experience when interacting with a rude or irritated customer. The suppression of the emotions results in this case to costs for both the employee and the organization employing the person.

What these employees get from their superiors is an "understanding" of their problems. They are only assured that they do not have to exist at the mercy of the abusive or manipulative customers and they have as much of rights as their customers. This sort of understanding also helps them to look at their emotions with a different perspective. The employees can change their response to these situations by thinking that "That customer must have been having a bad day because he normally isn't so unreasonable." (Emotional Labor Stresses Employees) at the end of it all the employees should think that customers are not always right and this attitude enables them to process and control their emotions instead of just hiding them. These methods also help in the prevention of a domino effect through which the ill fallout from one customer does not get passed on in the reaction of the employee to other customers. (Emotional Labor Stresses Employees)

In certain cases the emotional labor is called empathy and this is shown by many health-care professionals. They have to engage in emotional labor through deep acting or surface acting for their patients, and these actions are bereft of emotional or cognitive reactions. There is a feeling that physicians are better healers and have more satisfaction when they show empathy to their clients. The physicians should be the first to accept that their work has an element of emotional labor. This requires that they give themselves a practice so that they can empathize with their patients. This sort of a long-term and regular training helps the medical students and residents. It also helps in the development of their ability to empathize. (Clinical Empathy as Emotional Labor in the Patient-Physician Relationship)