Emotional Labor - Essay Example

Emotional labor is the process through which employees are expected to manage their feelings with respect to organizationally defined guidelines and rules. In most places of work nowadays, the products of our labor are for the most part non-physical in nature, they are emotional that is, the products that result from the interaction between people. In essence, people may work in the exchange of physical products, but it is usually the job of the service laborer to attach anything of emotional value to them.

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The one time in my life where I participated a lot in emotional labor is when I was given a position of a customer service representative at Spiro Airlines. My roles and responsibilities revolved around the resolving of customer complaints through phone calls, mail, and email. Secondly, it was expected of me to make telephone calls to all the customers of our corporation and substantiate account details. It was also expected of me to greet customers in a warm manner and ascertain reason or problem for making a call. The placement of refunds, orders, and exchanges was also within my job responsibilities.

In my job, there were instances where I have managed to deal with very rude people. In such cases, I had to control all my emotions and still perform my job in the right way. All my days at Spiro Airlines entailed handling dozens of customer requests from the normal routines to the unsatisfied customers. Irrespective of the personal and work issues that I had to deal with on a daily basis, I had to put on a happy face for excellent job reviews from my immediate bosses and our superiors in the company. In addition to that, it was a requirement that I regulate my emotions with respect to the emotional labor constructs the company had placed in my disposition.

As a customer service worker, I had to time and again get a hold of my emotions on the job to be able to seem professional when it came to matters of dealing with negative situations and rude or disgruntled customers. There was a time when my personal life was in shambles when burglars robbed my house clean, and I had to start from scratch. It was very much of a challenge because I had to go to work every morning and act like everything was okay; to be polite and happy to the entirety of Spiro Airline customers. On the inside, however, I was full of depression and devastation. I had a feeling of uneasiness because my real emotions and my fake emotions were drastically at odds with one another.

In my place of work, I had to portray the two types of emotional labor that are, deep acting and surface acting. Deep acting required of me to try to feel a particular emotion that I was thinking about in my mind. For instance, prior to the burglary, I used to get a warm feeling when I thought about my nicely furnished home and how I would have a good time after work. What this would do is to put me in a good mood, and I would respond to the issues of customers with politeness and enthusiasm.

Another thing that was characteristic of my job is surface acting. This was when I had to fake my emotions to meet up with a number of certain social or work rules. For instance, the next day after I found that my house was robbed clean, I was very upset. All the same, my supervisor had no clue that I was in personal turmoil because I still managed to offer positive and upbeat customer service to all of the customers affiliated with Spiro Airlines.

On a personal level, I can define emotional labor as a pointer to how workers can be able to handle adversity in the workplace if they permit their emotions to negatively impact their performance. In addition to that, emotional labor is a key performance indicator on how an individual can deal with challenging customers and situations without resorting to emotional dissonance. Emotional dissonance takes place when workers are not able to get a hold of their emotions, and in such an instance the real emotions may become a hindrance to job performance.

In my position as a customer service representative, I was expected to be much more intuitive, more innately willing, more intuitive and able to offer advice and succor to all the customers that were interested in the company products. Business and marketing constructs do not allow workers in my position to be emotionally lazy.

Sociological imagination refers to the vivid awareness of the link between personal experiences and the wider society. For the period of time that I was a customer representative, I got to learn that sociological imagination resonates with emotional labor in that workers should be able to strike a balance between their personal life and issues and the customers they serve i.e. the wider society.