Summary:
Giving a good show, keeping your face, professionalism in customer service can be examples of emotional work. When dealing with others in the workplace, whether colleagues or clients, we tend to give a positive emotional response despite the other person’s negativity (customer complaint) or our own known current mood (sadness, irritability). as emotional dissonance. In this article we will explore the phenomenon of emotional labor and its effect on worker productivity and social relationships. The overall result is that the tension of that dissonance creates mental health problems in the workplace.
Introduction:
Emotional labor can be seen as the effect of a worker’s current mood while engaging in interactions with others, for example putting on a good face despite feeling emotionally uncomfortable. (1. Robins/Judge 2013) These emotions can be driven by organizational expectations for employee behavior toward customers, customers, and co-workers in support of business objectives for profit. For example, in the service industry, customer complaints must be handled with a polite, smiling professional demeanor so that the customer feels that their complaints are receiving serious attention. Despite the fact that the service provider (customer relations officer) may be in a bad mood, have life problems or work concerns, all of this is put aside in order to provide a positive public image of the company to the client. For the employee engaging in such activities, the strain of appearing positive and enthusiastic can cause both physical and emotional strain, often leading to further deterioration in mood after work and between assignments. It could be argued that much of the time we are faking our emotions (feelings) in front of and towards others in order to support social conventions, eg being polite. If a customer’s complaint is unreasonable, they are showing anger, blaming the company, or misleading them and selling shoddy products; the company’s service support worker must maintain control over his own emotions despite feeling that the customer is wrong and that the complaint is unjustified or even ridiculous. they have yet to maintain the company-driven reaction to the customer with calm professionalism. (2. Myler – Case Studies 2018) Some companies make being happy at work almost mandatory, where staff entertain, create an atmosphere or foster enthusiasm for the product and associated feelings of happiness. For example, theme park staff are forced to smile all day, try it for yourself, it’s very stressful to maintain a happy attitude in the face of disgruntled visitors waiting hours in line for a five minute ride or the ticket worker. phone shop that is asked to entertain. the queue of customers waiting with hi five and silly games. (3. Grandey et.al. 2010) In fact, many clients report being uncomfortable with unwanted attention and interaction). Therefore, there is a difference between the emotions felt (what I am really thinking and feeling) and the emotions shown (what is expected of me). After an interaction, the employee may feel drained by the forced situation and emotionally angry for faking his feelings for the benefit of others. Many people who suffer from depression report that faking happiness is the biggest stress of the day.
Culture and Emotional Work
Culture can impact how someone views emotional labor as the expectations of others in light of social comparison. (4. Matsumoto et al. 2009) For example, many American service jobs, such as retail staff, service providers, and customer interaction workers, feel that a positive, upbeat, smiling, and enthusiastic person is a requirement. definitive for the management of the image of the companies. The monocor – have a nice day – often rings false in the ears of those who understand that this is not a genuine sentiment but a practiced social grace. In other cultures, such as Japan or Asia in general, forced courtesy or deference to show no emotion can, in fact, cause particular stress in everyday life, where displaced emotion can be seen in acts of violence and sexual deviance. The French tend not to show openness in dealing with customers, but rather a non-smiling or even rude attitude towards their customers. This can cause companies operating in global markets to struggle with staffing having to adapt and understand the policy according to the underlying cultural expectations of behavior.
mental health
Many psychologists, counselors, and others such as nurses encounter patients (clients) who may present with mental health issues such as anxiety (worry about future events) or depression (living with the past) who report difficulties in the workplace to pretend his emotions towards both. colleagues and clients – who feel the stress of the day at home later through irritability, sexual indifference, lack of appetite and sleepiness. Therefore, keeping up appearances at work affects the very quality of our lives both inside and outside the workplace. (5. Myler Case Studies 2018) Dealing with difficult people, whether they are clients or colleagues, leaves us physically and mentally drained. In therapy, the psychologist may look for psychodynamic reasons for negative feelings from past behavior patterns, and often loses the power of the here-and-now effect of faking his feelings at work simply because of company-imposed policies. that force us to present an image. of well-being and happiness that does not really exist. Therefore, treatment should focus on work stress rather than personal history.
Role play and emotional work:
Of course, from childhood we are educated on how to act in certain social situations, for example, being happy at a birthday party (don’t spoil it for everyone) to looking sad at the funeral (even when we didn’t even like the deceased). . We have learned behaviors for situational displays of affection. Have you ever been scolded, criticized, looked at the person with a smile on your face and said, “What are you smiling about?” they think you’re not taking them seriously enough by acknowledging their concerns; the truth is that we may think that their comments are unwarranted and silly; however, our learned correct response is: look serious and listen carefully, while all the while inwardly feeling what an idiot this person is! In other words, we are often asked to pretend, for the sake of other people’s feelings, this is often seen as great empathy when in fact it is more often a learned reaction to a situational event. Emotional intelligence is seen as a panacea for managerial effectiveness, but perhaps little more than learned responses to situations, rather than a genuine cognitive response to some event. In other words, emotional intelligence may be more pop psychology than fact. The measure of emotional understanding may no longer reflect the learned response to given situations that we have come to understand through our community’s cultural, generational, and traditional mores or group behavior. Psychometric tests for emotional intelligence may, in fact, be invalid and not robust enough to provide a useful measure of a person’s feelings toward others, but they do in fact reflect that learned behavior: what the response should be, not what. What I really feel inside
Theory of attributions – Misunderstanding of others:
The theory of attribution (6. Heider – 1958) suggests that we pay more attention to what we see than to what we know. In other words, we do indeed judge a book by its cover. So if we’re busy faking our emotions, should everyone else be too? So how do we know that the mood shown to us is genuine or fake? We pride ourselves on being able to tell the feelings of others by their genuine-seeming facial expressions and authentic-sounding responses. In fact, most of the time we may be reacting to the feigned emotion rather than the real one. We are often surprised to hear that someone committed suicide, we can say, they always seemed so positive and happy, but that is exactly what a misattribution is: the lack of skills to identify a real emotion from a feigned one. We’re actually pretty good at emotional labor at work, and therefore we really know what someone is really feeling, as opposed to what they’re showing us. So the helpful store clerk can get really bored with having to seem enthusiastic about a product he’s already talked about ten times that day.
In summer:
Emotional labor is a situation in which the employee expresses the company’s desired response to a given situation. Emotional dissonances are our feeling of confusion between our internal feelings and the face we put on in the situation given the company’s policy towards others. Therefore, the emotions felt are what we really feel instead of the emotion shown being the feigned response to another person. Finally, emotional intelligence is nothing more than learned responses to events as we behave given the situation in which we find ourselves. The consequences of feigned emotions can be stress leading to emotional exhaustion that has both physical and emotional results for mental health and general well-being. In fact, judging others can lead to misattributions where we think the feigned emotion is, in fact, the other party’s real feelings.
Being honest, open, and authentic would be true intimacy in our relationships, but it comes with a high risk of rejection and misunderstanding.
References:
1. Robins SP Judge TA 2013 – Organizational Behavior 15Ed Pearson Publishing
2. Myler SF 2018 – Myler Case Studies 2018/19 Unpublished
3. Grandey A. et al. 2010 – Working in the Global Service Economy – Service Management Magazine.
4. Matsumoto D. 2009 – Culture and emotional expression – New York, Taylor & Francis publication.
5. Myler SF 2019 – Myler 2019 Case Studies Unpublished
6. Heider F 1958 – Attribution Theory – Oxford Dictionary of Psychology 2001