Emotional labour experienced by support staff in a South African context

Abstract

Introduction It cannot be denied that employees bring their emotions to work, especially since emotions form a core part of individuals and cannot be separated from them and is thus part of organisational life. Emotions may influence an individual’s judgement, assessment and understanding of work events, and may therefore add to the complexity of work behaviour. The act of managing emotions and the emotional expressions at work for the purpose of compensation and consistency with the ‘display rules’ of an organisation is known as emotional labour. Emotional labour thus encompasses the management of feelings in an attempt to portray acceptable facial and bodily display to the public. Organisations have implicit and explicit emotional display rules that employees should abide, regardless of the employees’ felt emotions. Emotional labour is conducted by employees in an attempt to adapt, control or manage emotions viewed as inappropriate in the work environment. As such, emotional labour is associated with emotional regulation strategies, deep, surface or genuine acting. The concept of emotional labour has been developed and established within the services industry, for example, with flight attendants and teachers. This study aimed to explore how applicable the concept of emotional labour is within internal organisational services, namely, support staff in support departments across various South African industries. Research purpose The purpose of the study was to explore and describe the emotional labour strategies experienced and applied by support staff. The objectives are:  to explore the level of emotional labour performed by support staff  to describe to what extent difference in the levels of emotional labour occur across different support functions, and demographic groups  to describe the relationship that exists between emotional labour and intention to quit and job satisfaction. Research design, approach and method A cross-sectional survey design was used in this study. A non-probability sample was selected by means of availability and snowball sampling methods. The emotional labour scale, intention to quit and job satisfaction survey was administered to 269 individuals employed in support departments in paper-based and electronic format. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23 was used to conduct descriptive and correlational statistics on the data. Main findings The results of this study showed that support staff do perform emotional labour, with the use of all four emotional labour strategies, namely, hiding feeling, faking emotions, deep acting and genuine acting. Based on the sample used for this study, there was no statistical significant differences between gender, race and educational groups in terms of the emotional labour strategy used. There was, however, a weak, negative relationship between job satisfaction and surface acting, which was measured through hiding feelings and faking emotions. Even though the study was restricted by many methodological limitations, which are discussed in the last chapter of the dissertation, the study did provide some insight into the emotional labour levels and strategies performed by the support staff in the sample within a South African context.