Sources of Behavior
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bus117_w1d2_notes.docxBUS117 W1D2
Sources of Emotions and Moods
EMOTIONAL LABOR
If you’ve ever had a job in retail sales or waited on tables in a restaurant, you know the importance of projecting a friendly demeanor and smiling. Even though there were days when you didn’t feel cheerful, you knew management expected you to be upbeat when dealing with customers. So you faked it. Every employee expends physical and mental labor by putting body and mind, respectively, into the job. But jobs also require emotional labor an employee’s expression of organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions at work.
The concept of emotional labor emerged from studies of service jobs. Airlines expect their flight attendants to be cheerful; we expect funeral directors to be sad and doctors emotionally neutral. But emotional labor is relevant to almost every job. At the least your managers expect you to be courteous, not hostile, in interactions with coworkers. The true challenge arises when employees have to project one emotion while feeling another. 30 This disparity is emotional dissonance , and it can take a heavy toll. Bottled-up feelings of frustration, anger, and resentment can eventually lead to emotional exhaustion and burnout. 31 It’s from the increasing importance of emotional labor as a key component of effective job performance that we have come to understand the relevance of emotion within the field of OB.
Emotional labor creates dilemmas for employees. There are people with whom you have to work that you just plain don’t like. Maybe you consider their personality abrasive. Maybe you know they’ve said negative things about you behind your back. Regardless, your job requires you to interact with these people on a regular basis. So you’re forced to feign friendliness.
It can help you, on the job especially, if you separate emotions into felt or displayed emotions. 32 Felt emotions are an individual’s actual emotions. In contrast, displayed emotions are those that the organization requires workers to show and considers appropriate in a given job. They’re not innate; they’re learned. “The ritual look of delight on the face of the first runner-up as the new Miss America is announced is a product of the display rule that losers should mask their sadness with an expression of joy for the winner.” 33 Similarly, most of us know we’re expected to act sad at funerals, regardless of whether we consider the person’s death a loss, and to appear happy at weddings even if we don’t feel like celebrating.
Effective managers have learned to be serious when giving an employee a negative performance evaluation and to hide their anger when they’ve been passed over for promotion. A salesperson who hasn’t learned to smile and appear friendly, despite his or her true feelings at the moment, typically won’t last long in the job. How we experience an emotion isn’t always the same as how weshow it.
Displaying fake emotions requires us to suppress real ones. Surface acting is hiding inner feelings and forgoing emotional expressions in response to display rules. A worker who smiles at a customer even when he doesn’t feel like it is surface acting. Deep acting is trying to modify our true inner feelings based on display rules. A health care provider trying to genuinely feel more empathy for her patients is deep acting. 34 Surface acting deals with displayed emotions, and deep acting deals with felt emotions. Research shows surface acting is more stressful to employees because it entails feigning their true emotions. 35 Displaying emotions we don’t really feel is exhausting, so it is important to give employees who engage in surface displays a chance to relax and recharge. A study that looked at how cheerleading instructors spent their breaks from teaching found those who used their breaks to rest and relax were more effective instructors after their breaks. 36 Instructors who did chores during their breaks were only about as effective after their break as they were before.
