Question

What is emotional labor? Provide an example of a situation when you have experienced emotional labor. What kinds of jobs tend to involve emotional labor? What can organizations do to help minimize the negative consequences of emotional labor?

Answer 1

Emotional labor is the process of aligning the employee feelings and emotions with the emotional requirements of a job. Employees need to manage their negative emotions through emotional labor to ensure less conflicts and a stress and emotion free work environment.

I have experienced emotional labor during my interaction with a rude customer. He acted very rudely and scolded me very badly for delayed response from the service team. Though I felt like crying, I did not show any emotions outside and spoke politely to the customer. Customer satisfaction is very important for us and hence I did not show my negative emotions to the customer.

Service related jobs where the employees need to have face to face interaction with the customers tend to involve emotional labor to a great extent. As the customers are very important to ensure success of the business, the service industry employees should exercise emotional labor to ensure maximum customer satisfaction.

The organizations can arrange necessary training as well as stress management programs for the employees to reduce the negative effects of emotional labor. Another method is to reward the employee who has shown excellent skill in customer service by without showing negative emotions and best serving the customer. Another way is to increase the salary of the employees working in service industry to balance the negative effects of emotional labor with higher compensation.