Most people have contacted an organization in a moment of frustration at one time or another. A customer service agent’s day mainly involves managing clients’ negative emotions, but always with a smile. A smile, even though it can be authentic, can also be a mask, especially in a context where an employee’s work requires it. This mask can become exhausting. This phenomenon is not new in the research: it is known as emotional labour.
Picard and colleagues (2018) studied this topic, examining how emotional labour is associated with the emotional exhaustion and service performance of call-centre employees.
Legend: Recommendation of our expert
Expert advisor:
- MICHEL COSSETTE, professor, Department of Human Resource Management, HEC Montréal
Authors:
- Étienne FOUQUET, research assistant, Université de Sherbrooke
- MARIE-ÉLISE LABRECQUE, research professional, Université de Sherbrooke
This initiative was made possible through a collaboration with the Université de Sherbrooke.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY:
Emotional labour
This is work in which emotions must be expressed based on social expectations. This is the case for work that involves customer service, in which an employee must show emotions expected by the organization to respond to clients.
Emotional labour can be expressed in three ways:
- By deep acting, that is, the management or adjustment of one’s inner emotional state to show the emotions expected by the organization. The impact of a client’s unpleasant words can be reduced by diverting one’s attention away from anger and by emphasizing concrete aspects of the client’s problem.
- By surface acting, which involves hiding an emotion or pretending to feel an emotion to satisfy the organization’s requirements. It can mean smiling without necessarily feeling joy, or hiding irritation in front of an unhappy client.
- By the natural expression of emotions, which is naturally expressing feelings that are experienced. However, as the organization’s requirements do not allow employees to express negative emotions towards clients, it mainly involves the expression of positive emotions.
The forms of emotional labour vary according to the degree of authenticity that employees experience. Authenticity is the sense of choice and self-expression that can protect against emotional exhaustion.
Emotional exhaustion
It is expressed through a lack of energy and great emotional fatigue. In other words, emotional exhaustion is the feeling of being drained of energy. A person who is emotionally exhausted therefore has difficulty getting up to go to work, has no energy at the end of the day and feels depleted.
Service performance
This is a matter of adopting positive emotions and helpful behaviours towards clients, with an attitude that is warm, friendly and authentic. In other words, it comes back to serving the client with a smile, so that clients see that the smile is authentic and truly felt.
Method
- Country: Québec, Canada
- Recruitment of participants: Participants were from a call centre in the insurance sector.
- Number of participants: 215
- Method used: Personal questionnaires administered onsite by researchers.
- Number of women: 58.1%
- Average age: 30.27 years
- Average seniority: 1.25 years
WHAT DO THE STUDY’S RESULTS SHOW?
The study’s results show that the different forms of emotional labour affect emotional exhaustion and service performance.
- People who naturally express their positive emotions at work are the least likely to experience emotional exhaustion and show a better service performance.
- Because surface acting is the form that requires a person to expend more effort to hide it, by suppressing an emotion, it is the most likely to cause emotional exhaustion. Still, it seems that it does not have a significant effect on service performance. This suggests that this type of acting has negative effects on employees’ mental health, but not on their performance.
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