By Veerick Patel
A large proportion of work in the world requires us to be able to manage our emotions when interacting with others, be it co-workers, employers, customers or clients. For many of us working in the service sector, our management of emotions plays an essential role in our ability to complete tasks. The act of regulating these emotions is known as emotional labour.
We engage in emotional labour not only when the emotions required of us are different from what we actually feel, but also when they are the same. Both instances require us to manage the appropriate emotions in accordance with our employer’s expectations, but stress and a range of psychological issues can arise from us having to display emotions out of sync with how we feel.
Two ways we display emotions for work are deep acting, whereby we genuinely experience the emotions we aim to display, or surface acting, whereby we display the required emotion without genuinely experiencing them (Hochschild, 1979). Research indicates surface acting as being significantly associated with a range of psychological constructs that can hinder our wellbeing such as emotional exhaustion and depersonalization (Brotheridge & Lee, 2003).