Forms of Emotional Labor
Employees can display organizationally-desired emotions by acting out the emotion. Such acting can take two forms:
- surface acting, involves "painting on" affective displays, or faking; Surface acting involves an employee's (presenting emotions on his or her "surface" without actually feeling them. The employee in this case puts on a facade as if the emotions are felt, like a "personal").
- deep acting wherein they modify their inner feelings to match the emotion expressions the organization requires.
Though both forms of acting are internally false, they represent different intentions. That is, when engaging in deep acting, an actor attempts to modify feelings to match the required displays, in order to seem authentic to the audience ("faking in good faith"); in surface acting, the alternative strategy, employees modify their displays without shaping inner feelings. They conform to the display rules in order to keep the job, not to help the customer or the organization, ("faking in bad faith").
Deep acting is argued to be associated with reduced stress and an increased sense of personal accomplishment; whereas surface acting is associated with increased stress, emotional exhaustion, depression, and a sense of inauthenticity.
In 1983, Arlie Russell Hochschild, who wrote about emotional labor, coined the term emotional dissonance to describe this process of "maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning".
Read more about this topic: Emotional Labor
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