By: Ananya Gaunekar; Edited By: Shagun Khetan
In the popular K-Drama series, King the Land, the protagonist Sa-Rang works at the King Hotel as an employee. This hotel constantly stresses the need to keep up a ‘perfect smile’, the cornerstone of exceptional customer service and the symbol of the company’s values of warmth, professionalism and authenticity. While Sa-rang is lauded for her radiant smile despite the various situations she faces in the show, the audience also gets to glimpse the pressures of maintaining this facade despite what one might be feeling inside, because their job essentially depends on their emotions.
This is interestingly studied by Arlie Hochschild, who referred to it as ‘emotional labour’. “It was that ‘pinch’ or conflict, between such feelings and the pilot’s call for authenticity that led me to write down in my own notebook, 'emotional labour’,” she mentioned while observing the training program of Delta Airlines’ flight attendants. Emotion management is something that is observed in many people whether in their private life or public. Instances of heightened feelings in a formal setting may lead one to placate themselves because it is not ‘appropriate’ with respect to the situation. This feeling of societal disapproval invokes the ‘pinch’ that Hochschild talks about in the quote above: feeling indifference at a funeral or happiness at someone’s failure.
But how is this dichotomy translated into the professions that employ emotional labour ? What happens when such a distinction eventually disappears? And how does one effectively problematise these effects in order to take appropriate action on them? These are the primary questions that this article will tackle building off of the arguments put forth by Hochschild in her book, ‘The Managed Heart’.
In her book, Hochschild focuses her attention to the experiences of flight attendants, however, this article takes into account two more professions that revolve around emotional labour: hotel staff and call centre agents. This is primarily because they exhibit emotional labour in a higher frequency given the nature of their profession.
Being an employee at a hotel is an all-rounded job, requiring mental, physical and emotional labour in order to function. Employees not only have to fulfil the wishes of their customers but also manage the logistics of bookings, check-ins and check-outs and customer complaints, all while maintaining a ‘smile’ on their faces. On the other hand, a call centre agent never has any face-to-face interactions with the customer. So how do they exhibit emotional labour in their jobs? Well, call centre agents are required to maintain a ‘vocal’ smile on their calls through the use of pre-prepared scripts and changes in the tone and inflections of their voice. Since customer satisfaction forms an integral part of their job, it is their duty to put on this ‘smile’, whether or not their inner emotions reflect the same. Hotel staff are taught to be welcoming and warm in order to increase customer satisfaction. This applies even to the ‘badly behaved’ customers; despite the amount of anger, disrespect and frustration they show, they must be on their best behaviour and take everything in stride. Similarly, call centre agents must keep their cool and be helpful irrespective of the insults thrown at them. They must ‘absorb’ the anger of their customer and respond to them in a positive manner, since that is the very essence of their job. This makes one wonder: How does an employee regulate their emotions or maintain their ‘smile’ despite having conflicting inner feelings due to bad experiences?
For Hochschild, the answer lies in acting. Emotional management, as she points out, can be done in two ways: 1)Surface acting and 2) Deep acting.
Surface acting, in its most basic sense, refers to the outward exhibition of a required emotion without modifying inner feelings. “...we deceive others about what we really feel, but we do not deceive ourselves.” On the other hand, deep acting is the method of deceiving one’s own self into believing a particular emotion. In the entertainment industry, it is called ‘method acting’.
For instance, when a customer lashes out at a hotel staff member in person or a call centre agent over the phone, deep acting involves the employee trying to manifest the ‘smile’ by thinking of or doing things that might make them feel happy while surface acting is merely putting up the facade of a ‘smile’ while internally feeling something contradictory. Researchers also introduce another form of emotional labour referred to as genuine emotions which is what an employee aims to have, and might even have at the beginning of their job, however, various factors including, but not limited to, bad customer experience can make it tedious to genuinely feel motivated and happy in that particular job. So, if genuine emotions are difficult to achieve, which of the two other options is better suited for jobs requiring a large amount of emotional labour?
Well, both surface and deep acting involve a significant influencing of emotions; the reflexive suppression of emotion and the active influencing and mirroring of outward emotions respectively. But neither of them has been definitively proven to consume larger amounts of psychological resources. Faking the ‘smile’ might be an easier way to cope with the negative aspects of the job, however not only does it lead to a drop in job satisfaction and motivation of the employees leading to emotional exhaustion and burnout, but also more importantly, a spillover of their public emotions into their private life. Many flight attendants, in Hochschild’s research, spoke of an ‘artificial elation’ experienced by the flight attendants after an exhausting day of work, which arises as the distinction between the real feeling and the outward feeling gradually disappears. Surface acting structurally deprives workers of control over their own feelings which may lead to feelings of alienation and dehumanisation, resulting in a deterioration of their mental health.
Deep acting, however, has proven to be a better technique of emotion management, not only leading to lower levels of fatigue but also higher motivation and interpersonal relationships. It might be taxing to employ initially, but in the long term it provides ample benefits to the employee in both their personal and professional life.
While emotional dissonance from harsh treatment can be improved through emotional strategization, there are broader structural issues embedded within the service sector that disproportionately affect female employees. One such issue is the sexualisation of female employees.
Recent reports showed that women occupied around 54% of total employment in the global travel and tourism industries, which includes not only hotel staff, but also travel operators, tour guides and so on. Similarly, 71% of call centre agents in the global call centre industry are women, to the extent that it has been dubbed the ‘female ghetto’.While these statistics reflect impressive female labour force participation, they also reveal a troubling trend. Firstly, most service jobs require emotional labour which women are believed to be particularly good at. Women are assumed to be better at a form of expressive intonation in which they use a higher pitch range, one which is more pleasing to a customer. Another prominent reason why women are preferred for both these roles is because of preconceptions about their agreeability. Both call centre agents and receptionists are provided with a set of pre-written answers for certain questions as well as a directive to create small talk with the customer by using words like ‘okay’ and ‘I see’. Evidence shows that women are more compliant with the directives than men which make them the obvious choice for the job.
An appalling fact that Hochschild pointed out was that female flight attendants were highly sexualised to attract more customers, particularly male customers. The companies’ idea was that men are scared of flying so the presentation of a beautiful woman would induce sexual arousal, which would take their minds off the fear. This sexualisation is also observed through the uniforms worn by the receptionists. All these factors then inherently give leeway to customers to harass the employees, and that too without any significant consequences. Studies show that women are more likely to be sexually harassed and verbally abused by customers(almost 75%).
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