MBA5

Emotion Labor in the Workplace

The rules for expressing emotions on the job are clearly different from those in personal life. In intimate relationships (at least in mainstream Western culture), it’s often important to tell friends, family, and loved ones exactly how you feel.

In the workplace, however, it can be just as important to conceal emotions for the sake of clients, customers, coworkers, and supervisors—and also to protect your job. Emotion labor—the process of managing and sometimes suppressing emotions has been studied in a variety of occupational contexts. A few examples:

• If firefighters don’t mask their emotions of fear, disgust, and stress, it will impede their ability to help the people whose lives they are trying to save. Emotion-management training is therefore vital for new firefighters.

• Correctional officers at two minimum-security prisons described the tension of needing to be “warm, nurturing, and respectful” to inmates while also being “suspicious, strong, and tough.” The officers acknowledged that it’s taxing to manage competing emotions and juggle conflicting demands.

• Money is an emotion-laden topic, which means that financial planners often engage in emotion labor. Researchers concluded that “relationships and communication with clients may indeed be more central to the work of financial planners than portfolio performance reports and changes in estate tax laws.”

While some of these occupations deal with life-and- death situations, emotion management is equally important in less intensive jobs. For instance, most customer-service positions require working with people who may express their dissatisfaction in angry and inappropriate ways (“I hate this store—I’m never shopping here again!”). In situations like these, it’s usually unwise to “fight fire with fire,” even if that’s your natural impulse. Instead, competent on-the-job communicators can use the listening, defense- reducing, and conflict-management skills described throughout our course.

It’s not always easy to manage emotions, especially when you’re feeling fearful, stressed, angry, or defensive. Nevertheless, doing the work of emotion labor is often vital for success on the job.

Facilitative and Debilitative Emotions

Although feeling and expressing many emotions add to the quality of our relationships, not all feelings are beneficial. For instance, rage, depression, terror, and jealousy do little to help you feel better or improve your relationships. The following pages will give you tools to minimize these unproductive emotions.

First, there is a distinction between facilitative emotions, which contribute to effective functioning, and debilitative emotions, which detract from effective functioning. One difference between the two types is their intensity. For instance, a certain amount of anger or irritation can be constructive, because it often provides the stimulus that leads you to improve the unsatisfying conditions. Rage, however, usually makes matters worse. The same holds true for fear. A little bit of fear before an important job interview might give you the boost that will improve your performance.

Not surprisingly, debilitative emotions like communication apprehension can lead to a variety of problems in personal, business, educational, and even medical settings.When people become anxious, they generally speak less, which means that their needs aren’t met; and when they do manage to speak up, they are less effective at communicating than their more confident counterparts.

A second characteristic that distinguishes debilitative feelings from facilitative ones is their extended duration. Feeling depressed for a while after the loss of a job is natural, but spending the rest of your life grieving over your loss would accomplish nothing. In the same way, staying angry at someone for a wrong inflicted long ago can be just as punishing to you as to the wrongdoer. Social scientists call this rumination—dwelling persistently on negative thoughts that, in turn, intensify negative feelings. A substantial body of research confirms that rumination increases feelings of sadness, anxiety, and depression. Just as bad, people who ruminate are more likely to lash out with displaced aggression at innocent bystanders.

Minimizing Debilitative Emotions

How can you overcome irrational thinking? Social scientists have developed a simple yet effective approach. When practiced conscientiously, it can help you cut down on the negative self-talk that may lead to many debilitative emotions.

1. Monitor your emotional reactions.

Recognize when you are feeling debilitative emotions.

2. Note the activating event.

After you are aware of how you are feeling, the next step is to figure out what triggered your response. Sometimes there isn’t a single activating event, but rather a series of small events that finally builds toward the debilitative emotions.

Perhaps these emotions occur when you are around specific people, or maybe you are bothered by certain types of individuals. Certain settings may also stimulate unpleasant emotions. Sometimes the topic of conversation may set you off.

3. Record your self-talk.

This is the point at which you analyze the thoughts that are the link between the activating event and your feelings. If you are serious about getting rid of debilitative emotions, consider writing down your self-talk when first learning this method. Putting your thoughts on paper will help you see whether they actually make any sense.

4. Dispute your irrational beliefs.

First, decide whether each belief you’ve recorded is rational or irrational. Next, explain why the belief is rational or irrational. Finally, if the belief is irrational, you should write down an alternative way of thinking that is more rational and that can leave you feeling better when faced with the same activating event in the future.

Example – if you are working in customer service and feel as though you are losing patience with your customers, you may be thinking that you are sick of working with the public and that everyone is obnoxious. When you dispute this belief, you may realize that it is an over-generalization to say that all people are obnoxious and most of the customers are very nice.

Replacing self-defeating self-talk with more constructive thinking is an especially effective tool for improving self-confidence and relational communication.

Emotional Fallacies

There are 7 types of fallacies to watch out for that can enhance debilitative emotions:

· Perfection (expecting to be perfect)

· Approval (seeking everyone's acceptance)

· Shoulds (not distinguishing between is and should)

· Over-generalization (basing beliefs on limited info, exaggerating)

· Causation (blaming emotions on others)

· Helplessness (not taking responsibility)

· Catastrophic Expectations (if something can go wrong, it will)

Summary

Expanding your emotional vocabulary, becoming more self-aware, and expressing mixed feelings are important. Recognizing the difference between feeling, thinking, and acting, as well as accepting responsibility for feelings instead of blaming them on others, lead to better reactions. Choosing the proper time and place to share feelings is also important, as is choosing the best channel for expressing emotions. Whereas some emotions are facilitative, others are debilitative and inhibit effective functioning. Many of these debilitative emotions are biological reactions rooted in the amygdala portion of the brain, but their negative impact can be altered through rational thinking. It is often possible to communicate more confidently and effectively by identifying troublesome emotions, identifying the activating event and self-talk that triggered them, and reappraising any irrational thoughts with a more logical analysis of the situation.