Transcript
ANYA JOHNSON
Emotional labour's a type of labour similar to physical and cognitive labour. It's when we have to exert effort to express emotions at work, particularly when we're dealing with people outside of our work.
HELENA NGUYEN
In many organisations, employees are expected to adhere to what is known as organisational display rules. These are expectations about the emotions that employees ought to display when interacting with customer clients or patients.
ANYA JOHNSON
The types of careers that involve a lot of emotional labour are those careers where you spend a lot of time interacting with people outside the organisation. So nurses or police officers, parking attendants, or customer complaint officers are typical of the kinds of jobs that involve emotional labour.
We know from the literature and from our own research that there are broadly two ways in which people can approach their emotional labour. We think of those as being surface acting and deep acting.
HELENA NGUYEN
Surface acting is when you display emotions that you don't genuinely feel either by faking emotions or suppressing emotions or amplifying emotions. Deep acting is when you try to genuinely feel the emotions that you ought to display such as taking a perspective of another person and trying to feel what they feel.
ANYA JOHNSON
In our research, what we found is that when people use surface acting strategies, it's much more detrimental to work outcomes. They feel much worse at work because it's very difficult to maintain two types of emotions at the same time. It becomes emotionally exhausting very quickly. What we also know is that it starts to affect how you feel about your work and how you feel about yourself.
On the other hand, when you're deep acting, because you've managed to realign your emotions and you're using genuine emotions in your interaction, it means that the response from the other person is much more genuine and much more positive. And so you then feel reinforced or rewarded for the effort you've put in. And that means that you feel genuinely more committed to the role. You feel genuinely that you're doing a good job. And that has an impact on your performance and also on your well-being at work.