Over the past few decades, the philosophy of workplace emotions has gained ample significance. Dismantling the previous notion of considering the workplace as a rational environment, emotions and emotional demands are considered critical in everyday organizational life. Employers are looking for emotionally competent employees to ensure quality interpersonal interactions in the workplace. The mounting attention towards the emotional dynamics at work emphasizes the significance of managing emotions in the workplace. Employees are expected to articulate suitable emotions as part of their job requirements. This effort to express appropriate emotions prescribed by the organization during interface is termed emotional labor. With the expansion of service-oriented businesses, Emotional labor has surfaced as a work-related stressor. This chapter addresses the relationship between Emotional Labour and Stress in the workplace and its repercussions on both employees and organizations.
TopIntroduction
The paradigm shift to service-oriented economies has expanded the need to understand the critical role of emotions in workplace interactions. Emotions are considered a vital ingredient of everyday organizational life (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995, p.98).
As Bolton (2005) mentioned in his book ‘Emotion Management in the workplace’, it has been recognized in recent times that organizations have feelings. In Bolton’s words,
Emotion is a lived, interactional experience with traffic rules of interaction framing how it is expressed and shared. Employees draw on professional, organizational and commercial codes of conduct and social feeling rules in their interactions with others” (2005, p.5)
Emotions are vital to multiple facets of human functioning, and it affects the interpersonal relations of employees in the workplace. The interactions in the workplace have an emotional component, and those emotions are crucial to creating a desirable image for the customers. The customer service encounters are often directed and controlled through the emotional display rules prescribed by the organizations. Employees often try to manage their emotional displays to conform to the display rules of the organizations.
Presenting a positive demeanor to customers or clients involves managing complex emotional processes. Employees need multifaceted emotional competencies to satisfy the emotional demands of the organization. Therefore, it is axiomatic that the workers should adopt appropriate strategies to manage emotions. Those emotional experiences of the employees have an impact on various outcomes that affect the employees as well as the organizations. In this context, the study of Emotional labor needs attention (Alias & Sarada, 2017).
TopBackground
Emotional Labour
Emotional labor is one of the key domains in organizational psychology that has increased exponential curiosity among researchers and academicians. Emotional labor is a term coined by an American sociologist, Arlie Russel Hochschild. In her book “The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling”, Hochschild (1983) defined Emotional labor as “…the management of feelings to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; Emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value” (p.7). Emotional labor is the expression of organizationally desired emotions during interactions at work. It can be either face-to-face interaction or voice-to-voice interaction.
Hochschild (1983) described that the employees manage their emotions according to the ‘feeling rules’ prescribed by the organization. The feeling rules were rephrased by Ashforth & Humphrey (1993) as display rules in their study that analyzed Emotional labor from a behavioral perspective.