It has been long recognized that everyone wears an emotional mask. Specially, in the context of the service sector, job requirements mandate display rules requiring the expression of certain emotions that may not necessarily be felt by employees. Such regulation of emotions often leads to stress and burnout that negatively impact employees' physical and psychological health. Emotional labour is thus a worrisome phenomenon. Against this backdrop, this chapter concerns itself with finding solutions that could potentially alleviate the associated problems of personal and organizational well-being. Extant literature observes numerous suggestions about these detrimental effects being mitigated by spirituality. Academics recommend that organizations could employ workplace spirituality initiatives to replenish the emotional resources exhausted due to emotional labour. This chapter thus addresses the empirical association between workplace spirituality and emotional labour among teachers in higher education sector – the service professionals claimed to be most negatively impacted by emotional labour.
TopIntroduction
Long before Hochschild (1983) first coined the term emotional labour (Kim et al., 2017), and progressed its theoretical development (Arshadi & Danesh, 2013), it was recognized that everyone, whether aware or not, plays a role all the time (Park, 1950), and wears an emotional mask (Goffman, 1961) in relationships. In the context of certain job requirements, especially in the services sector, Hochschild (1983) observed that organizations mandated display rules that required employees to express certain emotions that they may not necessarily feel and thus defined it as 'the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display for a wage’.
The importance of managing emotions in a growing services economy (Bratton & Watson, 2018) is expected to increase (Makkar & Basu, 2019), as it is believed that organizational display rules, implicit or explicit, influence clients’ feelings and enhance organizational outcomes (Baksi & Sürücü, 2019; Hochschild, 1983). Employees generally adopt emotion regulation strategies such as surface acting and deep acting (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Hochschild, 1983; Modekurti-Mahato et al., 2014). In the former, an employee may simply portray emotions without actually feeling them. In the latter, attempt is made to arouse genuine feelings, so displayed emotions are in congruence by “putting oneself in the other’s shoes” (Arshadi & Danesh, 2013; Diefendorff et al., 2005). For these reasons, deep acting is also termed as “faking in good faith” compared to surface acting which is termed as “faking in bad faith” (Austin et al., 2008; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987).
When employees attempt emotion regulation, that is, modify their feelings to suit work demands (Lee & Van Vlack, 2018), they experience emotional dissonance, as their expressions differ from actual feeling (Abraham, 1998). This phenomenon of emotional labour can also be understood through the ‘Job Demands-Resources’ (JD-R) model of burnout (Demerouti et al., 2001) based on the imbalance between excessive job demands that emotionally stretch people vis-a vis their available emotional capacity and resources to handle such demands.
Emotional labour is thus a worrisome phenomenon, and several theorists have pointed out its negative effects (Isenbarger & Zembylas, 2006) on the physical and psychological health of those engaging in it (Anomneze et al., 2016). Both surface acting and deep acting call for ‘expenditure of resources’ in the form of physiological effort and arousal, it is however, greater in the case of the former (Brotheridge & Lee, 2002). The emotional dissonance caused by surface acting has negative impact in the form of stress outcomes (Abraham, 1998) such as burnout, exhaustion, cynicism, reduced professional efficacy and job satisfaction, and depersonalization, (Kim et al., 2017), often leading to undesirable outcomes such as absenteeism and turnover (Zou & Dahling, 2017). On the other hand, deep acting, due to authenticity of expression (Kim et al., 2017), is associated with positive outcomes such as “feelings of accomplishment and enhanced identification with the work role” (Austin et al., 2008; Brotheridge & Lee, 2002; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987). Thus, while both strategies may adversely impact well-being (Grandey et al., 2013), research shows that it is surface acting that is more detrimental (Zou & Dahling, 2017), and a more frequently deployed strategy (Côté, 2005).