Emotional Labor, why its important?

  Emotional labor is described as “the effort, planning, and control needed to express organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions”. Hochschild points out those service providers often undertake acting strategies, surface or deep acting, to manage their emotions and to display their emotional labor (Hochschild 1979). For that reason those business entities which provides services and interacts with customers must understand their employee’s emotional labor status. This will assist them in ensuring their first line employees will always in a good mood and emotions while facing the customers. How? Training, knowledge exposure to Emotional Intelligence would be a great mark for the emotions stability.

Surface acting requires individuals to hide and repress their true feelings to conform to organizationally required emotion display rules. Deep acting refers to cases where employees fully identify with organizationally desired emotions and are willing to adjust their inner feelings to comply with them. Surface acting is the main cause of emotional labor. This is what Robbins addressed as the difference between felt emotions and displayed emotions (Robbins 2005).

It is suggested that dissonant emotions emerge and result in increased emotional labor when employees have to maintain appropriate behavior when facing impolite or unfriendly customers, and when they are involved in unfair interactions (Hennig-Thurau et al 2006), demonstrate that service employees who appear to be smiling, happy, and friendly are not genuinely feeling these emotions when interacting with angry or unhappy customers. Such surface acting increases the level of employees’ emotional labor.

Affective event theory (AET) suggests that events in the workplace have a significant impact on employees’ emotional reactions; and in turn, on their work attitudes and behavior. Applying this theory, Rupp and Spencer found that people who were unfairly treated experienced strong levels of anger relative to those were fairly treated (Rupp and Spencer 2006). Recently, employees’ mood states have been found to be associated with some important organizational outcomes, such as service performance. Research reveals that positive mood states enhance employee work performance, whereas negative mood states diminish work performance (Hochschild 1979).


Assignment Question for OB:

In change management, resistance to change would be one of the main challenge. Explain how could an organization overcome this challenges and explain the process of change according to Kotters and Lewin.

( Dalam mengurus perubahan dalam organisasi, antara cabaran yang utama ialah penolakan kepada perubahan dan terangkan bagaimana untuk mengatasinya. Terangkan proses perubahan mengikut Kotters dan juga Lewin).

Note:
a. Font: Arial
b. Size: 12
c. Word counts: 2,000 - 2,500 words
d. Cross referencing is a required - at least 5 journals.
e. Cut and paste from Internet or plagiarism work shall not be attended.


Case study for presentation - choose either one of the questions below:

 

Leaderships styles is a critical components in managing an organizations. Select one of the style  which is relevant to your organization and propose for leaderships improvements.

(Ciri-ciri kepimpinan adalah komponen kritikal dalam mengurus organisasi. Pilih salah satu ciri      kepimpinan yang mungkin digunapakai di dalam organisasi anda dan beri cadangan untuk  menambah baik kepimpinan tersebut)

   
OR

 
Emotions is an important knowledge in organizational behaviour. How could you capitalize on  emotions for organizational improvements? Explain.

(Emosi adalah ilmu pengetahuan yang penting di dalam tingkah laku organizasi. Bagaimana anda boleh menggunakan emosi untuk pembangunan organisasi? Terangkan.