EMOTIONAL LABOR

Emotional Labor

Emotional labor

Introduction

Expanding the services sector is having on the production is one of the distinguishing features of modern society. This means that more and more people are immersed in personal interactions in their work. Interactions for they must possess a certain emotional competencies in this context, the emotional labor is becoming frequent object of study, understood as the effort to control emotions that have to do the employee to meet the demands of their work (usually with the public). The Psychology of Work in the past has been very focused on work and physical or sensory intellectual work, but the emotional work has only begun to take interest in recent years. This has been due in part to the discovery of that there are certain factors some jobs that cannot be considered as physical aspects and intellectual aspects of work, but involve another level of consideration: the emotional level of the service sector itself (Gross,1998).

Discussion and Analysis The term 'emotional labor' was first coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild. She defined the term as "management of feeling to create a publicly facial and bodily display". Many companies and organization have something that are called 'display rules' wherein the employees are expected to express only or at least a certain set of emotions. Emotional labor, in such case, could be a part of this. Emotional labor is also in a way a part of office etiquette. Usually professions or jobs that include direct face-to-face contact with the customers/ consumers, or wherein employees would be engaged in making conversation with the customers (such as a receptionist, who deals with people face-to-face as well as over the phone) are the ones that call for emotional labor. An alternative term for emotional labor could be emotion regulation. Emotional labor takes place when part of a job entails managing one's own emotions, or attempting to manage others'.

As sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote about in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, flight attendants must not only appear friendly to sometimes difficult passengers, but also mask any fear they might feel in the course of flight.

Concept of Emotional Labor

The first definition of emotional labor (TE) is attributed to Hochschild in 1983 defines emotional labor as: “control of feelings to create body and facial expressions publicly observable”.

It is discovered while studying the labor aspects of the flight attendants, noting that their main task was the deal with the client and that this interaction was essential to express emotions that sometimes do not feel really. Although the definition of Hochschild refers specifically to publicly observable aspects, the author considers the internal processes involved. On the other hand, also implies sometimes emotional behavior appears sporadically and naturally, but sometimes may be forced to adapt to the role and expectations that the organization have regard to a specific post (Charles, 2010).

Characteristics of Emotional Labor

To speak of emotional work must meet a series of characteristics outlined below:

Interactions occur in face to face or voice to ...