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
Famous quotes containing the words forms of, forms, emotional and/or labor:
“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I would urge that the yeast of education is the idea of excellence, and the idea of excellence comprises as many forms as there are individuals, each of whom develops his own image of excellence. The school must have as one of its principal functions the nurturing of images of excellence.”
—Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)
“Although pretend play is important, it is still the means to an end, not the end itself. Do not make the mistake of thinking a contrived, pretend drama can substitute for real interpersonal comfort in dealing with important emotional issues.”
—Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)
“Cultivated labor drives out brute labor. An infinite number of shrewd men, in infinite years, have arrived at certain best and shortest ways of doing, and this accumulated skill in arts, cultures, harvestings, curings, manufactures, navigations, exchanges, constitutes the worth of our world to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)