Emotion Work History

2.1 HISTORY OF EMOTION WORK

As the three decade milestone of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s classic book, The Managed Heart, (1983) approaches, the study of Emotion work continues to be advanced by scholars from diverse disciplines and of varied perspectives. Emotion work is defined as the paid and unpaid work that involves the use of emotions to facilitate work-related tasks required in and outside of a workplace, as well as, the management of the workers’ own emotions in the workplace.

However, the term ‘Emotion work’ is not broad enough nor is it narrow enough to concretely define boundaries for a literature search. Studies of both, Emotion work that is paid and unpaid, are featured in this review of literature. The reason for including both

The four institutionalized mechanisms for regulating the experience and expression of emotion in the workplace are: (1) neutralizing, (2) buffering, (3) prescribing, and (4) normalizing emotion. However contrary to this perspective, they argued that emotionality and rationality were interpenetrated, i.e. emotions are an integral and inseparable part of organizational life, and emotions are often functional for the organization. This argument was illustrated by applications to motivation, leadership, and

This was done by designing a training intervention that taught employees to change their felt emotions to match organizationally-desired emotions by reappraising work situations in a more positive light. Appraisal theories of emotion, state that, emotions are generated by evaluations of situations or events. The purpose of the study was to increase positive emotions and decrease negative emotions in customer service employees by teaching them to appraise workplace events differently. Measures of dependent variables were taken for one week (five shifts) before the training and one week (five shifts) after the training. Additionally, a control group was included who received only general customer service training. The reappraisal training produced an increase in high pleasure, low arousal emotions compared to the control training. The reappraisal training also decreased feelings of inauthenticity and depersonalization compared to the control training in one sub