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International Conference on Technology and Business Management March 18-20, 2013 However, display rules have been conceptualized not only as role requirements of particular occupational groups, but also as interpersonal job demands, which are shared by many kinds of occupations 6. Emotional labour and various occupations In The Managed Heart, Hoshchild shows how the flight attendant is trained to manage fear at turbulence and anger at cranky or abusive passengers, a bill collector is trained to restrict compassion or liking for debtors. As the number of service jobs grows, so too does the amount of emotional labor. While many jobs can be stressful and even emotionally draining at times, it is in personal service occupations that emotional labour becomes a routine demand made on workers in the normal course of their day. Among other samples, such as sales representatives and debt collectors, Hochschild's research gave most attention to airline flight attendants employed by a private carrier with a reputation for high quality service while seen by many as an interesting and even glamorous career; it also qualifies as one which can make heavy demands in terms of emotional labour. The flight attendant, for example, must make passengers feel safe and well cared for in a pleasant environment, almost like guests in his or her own home. At the same time, they must repress their own feelings of anger or fear induced by difficult passengers or dangerous in-flight incidents. Unlike workers in other jobs, the flight attendant is expected to be as friendly, composed and alert at the end of a 16-hour shift as at the beginning. They are required to present a positive image of the airline, and even its home country, to large groups of people in a confined space who are able to observe any sign of annoyance or insincerity. In the early organizational literature on emotional labor in service settings, the work of Rafaeli and Sutton was prominent and they focused on emotional labor in service settings, across a variety of service jobs, and showed that customer reactions and organizational outcomes, particularly sales, were indeed affected by how employees express their feelings. Positive attitudes expressed by employees can create favorable impressions in customers’ minds, and negative attitudes can similarly engender unfavorable impressions (Pugh, 2001; Schneider, Parkington, & Buxton, 1980). When employees are seen by customers to be rude, or they behave inappropriately towards customers, an organization may lose in many ways. Not only may a direct sale be lost, but also future revenue from both the offended customer as well as everyone he/she convinces to avoid patronage. Further, while we know that positive outcomes are often associated with positive expression of emotion by employees (Pugh, 2001), the full effects of positive and genuine emotional expression by employees can have far-ranging beneficial effects for their employer. Pugh (2001) found that displays of positive emotions by bank employees were related to displays of positive affect by customers, and that these displays impacted positively on their evaluations of overall service quality. Teaching is a profession that involves a high level of emotional labour. This includes such behaviours as surface acting (displaying an emotion that is not actually felt), deep acting (the activity undertaken to actually feel a required emotion), and suppression of emotion .Teachers are expected to perform emotional labour in order to achieve the dual outcomes of customer (i.e., student satisfaction, and profit for the management)Studies revealed that managing the emotional demands of teaching requires considerable effort. Teachers who perform more emotional labour tend to be more emotionally exhausted and less satisfied with their teaching career - they also experience more conflict between their work and home lives. The emotional demands of teaching also attracts wide research and it is been found that it can even threaten teachers’ health, job satisfaction, work-life balance wellbeing and relationships with pupils. Increasingly, the role of the Information Technology department within organisations is seen as a service role. At the heart of IT services is the service encounter, the point where the customer and the IT service employee interact, whether over a phone at the help desk, in the office at the desktop, or in a corridor. This service role for information technology moves the focus to customers since delivering a service is about meeting customers’ needs. The thousands of individual service encounters make up the service and determine the quality of the service as perceived by customers. The rapid rise of the service sector, particularly the call centre industry has made the study of emotional labour increasingly important. The In a lot of IT industry, for example in call centres, most of the service interactions are voice to voice between two individuals. Regular complaints and the anger of frustrated members of the public can leave call centre staff emotionally drained and less able to respond appropriately to customer calls. call handlers voice is analysed for pace, volume and timbre to ensure the right `mood'. Emotional labour is particularly required in jobs in call centres where irate or rude customers are frequently encountered.. High levels of turnover and absenteeism in the industry invites special attention because of the relationship between the emotional demands (emotional labour) of call centre work and job satisfaction Nursing and health care is one big minefield in the emotional labour stakes. For a nurse who sees herself as a caring ,compassionate person, taking a few moments to console a patient in distress represents not a burden but makes her job more meaningful. Inorder to show compassion, care and warmth , nurses have to suppress 167
International Conference on Technology and Business Management March 18-20, 2013 their true emotions which may lead to stress. A nurse working in a hospital, is expected to express positive emotions towards patients, such as warmth and compassion Emotional labour, the projection of certain emotions during the context of a job performance, is an important source of competitive advantage in many service industries including tourism. Tourism is however a very distinct industry with few boundaries between those who are paid to give emotional labour and those who are expected to give it voluntarily. Only a limited range of emotional expression tends to be socially acceptable in the workplace for lawyers and while performing emotional labour, they should appear cool and emotionless to clients. Another area where emotional labour is prevalent is highly globalised service work of cruise shipping - an industry that demands hard labour, physical and emotional, from a labour force. Brinner (1995a) extends the argument for considering emotional labour in non-service communications further. Employees in jobs which appear to contain no emotional labour may still be rewarded for displays of emotion. For example, a proportion of highly successful employees in many occupations appear to achieve this success “almost solely as a consequence of this skill in impression management and self-presentation” (Brinner, 1995). Certainly in an interview situation, display of enthusiasm and excitement are often positively rewarded with the offer of a job. Flight attendants are expected to feel cheerful and friendly, continue to smile as the plane crashes, funeral directors are expected to feel sombre and reserved and nurses are expected to feel empathetic and supportive. So among the workers performing emotional labour, other than flight attendants, bill collectors, funeral directors, doctors, nurses etc, there include musicians also who perform even as the ship sinks and ride operators at an amusement park, 7. Implications of Emotional labour "Service with a smile, especially when mandated by the company, may be pleasing to the customer, but at the same time emotionally and physically stressful for the employee, especially if forced or insincere," says Dr. Alicia A. Grandey, assistant professor of industrial and organizational psychology at Penn State. "Many clerical and service jobs are already stressful, because they are low wage and low status, with employees having little or no control over their workplace conditions. Maintaining professionally positive expressions for the customer requires a kind of work termed `emotional labor' by some psychologists. Emotional labor may create significant stress, which has mental and physical costs," Grandey notes. It would seem inevitable that workers in these prescribed roles will not genuinely feel the emotion that they are expected to display all the time. To some degree or other, conflict will exist between what the individual really feels and the emotion they are expected to display. It has been argued (e.g. by Hochschild, 1979; 1983) that attempting to conform to those expectations causes certain “pernicious psychological effects” (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993, p. 89). High emotional labour within organizations, caused by organizational control of emotions, can lead to suppressing disagreements, eliminating employee voice and reduction in upward information flow (Putnam and Mumby, 1993). Norms for emotional control can also affect co-worker relationships. In particular, suppression of feelings during interactions with colleagues may result in altered relational perceptions and changed communication patterns (Putnam and Mumby, 1993) There is evidence that emotion labor may lead to employee's emotional exhaustion and burnout over time, and may also reduce employee's job satisfaction. That is, higher degree of using emotion regulation on the job is related to higher levels of employees' emotional exhaustion, and lower levels of employees' job satisfaction. The emotional dimensions of service employees, often leads to incredible stress, which can result in their leaving the profession. Studies indicate that emotional labor jobs require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person. For example, flight attendants are encouraged to create good cheer in passengers and bill collectors promote anxiety in debtors. Research on emotional contagion has shown that exposure to an individual expressing positive or negative emotions can produce a corresponding change in the emotional state of the observer. Accordingly, a recent study reveals that employees' display of positive emotions is indeed positively related to customers' positive affect. Positive affective display in service interactions, such as smiling and conveying friendliness, are positively associated with important customer outcomes, such as intention to return, intention to recommend a store to others, and perception of overall service quality. Both surface acting as well as deep acting has been linked to performance burnout and job turnover. Jobs that are particularly prone to burnout are those where you have to be relentlessly positive, so the caring professions like medicine, nursing, social work and teaching, (where there is a large amount of personal interaction that requires deep personal attention and concern) require a huge amount of emotional labour. Results revealed that 168
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