Leadership as Emotional Labour

Management and the 'Managed Heart'

Marian Iszatt-White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136226861
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Even if we don't realise it, most of us are now familiar with the idea of 'emotional labour'; that 'service with a smile' which everyone from cabin crew to restaurant or call centre staff is expected to give, irrespective of what they actually feel or think.

This book considers the complex ways in which this need to show (or hide) particular emotions translates into job roles – specifically those of leaders or managers – where the relationships are lasting rather than transient, two-way rather than uni-directional and have complex, ongoing goals rather than straight-forward, one-off ones. The book contends that these differences contribute unique characteristics to the nature of the emotional labour required and expounds and explores this new genus within the 'emotional labour' species. The main theme of this book is the explication and exploration of emotional labour in the context of leadership and management. As such, it focuses both on how our understanding of emotional labour in this context enriches the original construct and where it deviates from it.

By exploring these issues at the level of situated practices and the real world, real time experiences of leaders, the book seeks to make an innovative and nuanced contribution to our understanding of the emotional element within 'leadership work'.

1	Introduction
	The ‘Managed Heart’
	Marian Iszatt-White

In her seminal work, The Managed Heart, Hochschild (1983) drew attention to the increasing requirement by employers, particularly in service industries, for their staff to perform ‘emotion work’ or to attempt to change or manage their emotions in order to present only those feelings that are deemed suitable to the situation and/ or suppress those which are deemed inappropriate. The requirement to conform to socially accepted display rules or ‘feeling rules’ – i.e. we don’t laugh at funerals; we do smile at weddings; we speak respectfully to our bosses; we tend not to show explosive anger at work, and so on – is accepted by Hochschild as being in line with a learned ‘social structure’ and a necessary skill within a smooth-running society: it is the appropriation of this skill for commercial purposes that is most properly termed ‘emotional labour’ and that is under scrutiny here. The fixed smile and friendly, helpful manner of airline cabin crew and the cheery ‘have a nice day’ greeting of McDonalds staff – even in the face of the most difficult, unappreciative passenger or customer – is presented as the epitome of ‘the social actor’s ability to work on emotion in order to present a socially desirable performance and capitalism’s appropriation of that skill’ (Bolton and Boyd, 2003: 291). This appropriation of emotional skill is summarized by Hochschild in her description of the work airline cabin crew are expected to perform:

The company lays claim not simply to her physical motions – how she handles food trays – but to her emotional actions and the way they show in the ease of a smile … For the flight attendant, the smiles are a part of her work, a part that requires her to co-ordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless. To show that enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly. Similarly, part of the job is to disguise fatigue and irritation, for otherwise the labour would show in an unseemly way, and the product – passenger contentment – would be damaged. (Hochschild, 1983: 7–8)

Hochschild goes on to outline three modes of emotional expression, all of which can be drawn into commercial service. In the cognitive mode, the labourer attempts to change images, ideas or thoughts in the service of changing the feelings associated with them (a classic example of this in my own domain of education would be the reframing of a ‘failure’ as ‘an opportunity for learning’). Recognizing the link between the emotional and physical, the bodily mode of emotion management entails attempting to change somatic or other physical symptoms of emotion, such as trying to breathe more slowly or trying not to shake when we are nervous or frightened. In the third mode, the expressive mode, the act of trying to change expressive gestures in the service of changing inner feeling – for example trying to smile, or to cry – we are attempting to clothe ourselves in the accepted expressions of a particular emotion without feeling it on the inside.

In defining the construct of emotional labour, Hochschild delineated clear characteristics for jobs that may be expected to require emotional labour. They are said to:

•	entail face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public;
•	require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person; and
•	allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise control over the emotional activities of employees.

Bolton (2005) would add a fourth criterion to this list, namely the ‘creation of a profitable product with the use of emotional labour as a major factor in its production’ (2005: 51). The ‘product’ here need not be physical – indeed is more likely not to be – but constitutes some form of ‘value added’ to the underlying service such that customer satisfaction or contentment is enhanced and repeat business is more likely to be secured. Hence early studies were undertaken in relation to front-line service sector employees, such as airline cabin crew and – curiously, perhaps – debt collectors. In the latter case, the ‘value added’ was more effective repayment of debt rather than more contented customers, but the role of emotions – fear and shame in this case – is still evident in achieving this end. Later studies included broader forms of service, such as nursing staff and teachers, which still clearly meet Hochschild’s criteria for jobs requiring emotional labour. A strict interpretation of the above criteria may prompt a question as to the appropriateness of applying the term ‘emotional labour’ to leadership – depending upon how one interprets ‘the public’ and even ‘exercises control’. In this book, I, along with others, will contend that the term still makes sense in relation to our understanding of how leaders ‘do leadership’ and certainly adds value to our understanding of this important discipline. It can also be seen as adding a richness to the emotional labour construct without in any way diluting the power of its original focus.

In contemplating the ways in which emotional labour may be performed, and for whose benefit, Hochschild differentiated between ‘surface acting’, where the emotional labourer was required to put on a display of the appropriate emotion to the customer in compliance with organizational expectations, and ‘deep acting’ where the aim was to ‘deceiv[e] oneself as well as deceiving others’ (Hampson and Junor, 2005: 174, citing Hochschild, 1983: 33). This latter can be ‘either “passive” (the automatic, routine and largely unconscious adoption of a role) or “active” (working on one’s own thoughts and feelings in order to produce the required emotion and emotional impact)’ (Hampson and Junor, 2005: 174). Hochschild (1979: 558) clarifies the distinction by referring to two differing approaches to stage acting, that of adopting the ‘outward demeanour’ of the character to be portrayed versus that of the actor ‘guid[ing] his memories and feelings in such a way as to elicit the corresponding expressions’. In either case, it was Hochschild’s view that this relationship is entirely exploitative and one-sided, with the only gain or benefit to the employee being financial. Subsequent authors have seen this form of social interaction as more complex. So, for example, O’Brien (1994) saw emotional labour as an instrument of social control: in a study of health care provision and health promotion he suggested that ‘it is through performing emotional labours that nurses perceive that their primary lever for individual change lies’ (O’Brien, 1994: 402). Considering emotional labour by teachers, Price (2001) suggested that earlier accounts of the phenomenon ignore the potential for rewarding dimensions within this type of work, and how by drawing on ‘very ordinary, universal capacities for relating to others as deserving of recognition, empathy and respect’ (Price, 2001: 179) it gives a moral dimension to ‘human services’ work. Zapf and Holz (2006) considered the balance between positive and negative effects resulting from emotional labour, seeing the level of emotional dissonance as being important in determining the sense of stress versus personal accomplishment produced. And in seeing the concept of emotional labour as providing an incomplete account of interactive service work, Hampson and Junor, (2005) characterize it as a species of ‘articulation work’ – the invisible ‘working out and carrying through of work related arrangements’ (Strauss, 1993: 87, cited in Hampson and Junor, 2005: 168) which contribute to the total working interaction.

In one of the key extensions of the original theory, Bolton and Boyd (2003) take the view that Hochschild’s formulation of emotional labour – where ‘offering cynical performances in the form of “surface acting” results in ultimate alienation from one’s “true self” and deep acting, that is efforts to conjure up sincere performances, results in “altering” one’s self’ (Bolton and Boyd, 2003: 290, drawing on Hochschild, 1983: 186–8) – is too absolutist in its implementation and consequences. As such, it makes no allowance for the distinctions between the capitalist exploitation of ‘service with a smile’, emotion work arising from internalized views of professional norms of conduct, and emotion work arising in the normal course of social interaction (such as the ‘white lie’ which avoids hurting a friend’s feelings). In moving between these different modes, it is suggested that emotional labourers, such as airline cabin crew, are not always on the receiving end of an emotional agenda set by their employers, but are ‘skilled emotional managers who are able to juggle and synthesize different types of emotion work dependant on situational demands’ (Bolton and Boyd, 2003: 289). Bolton and Boyd’s concept of ‘skilled emotional managers’ thus recognizes a distinction between emotional work which occurs in response to the requirements of an employer or job role, where it may rightly be referred to as emotional labour, and that which occurs as a routine part of how we manage our emotions in the world. In recognizing this multiplicity of agendas, Bolton (2005) also identified four distinct types of emotional self-management in organizations:

•	pecuniary – which equates most directly to Hochschild’s ‘emotional labour’;
•	presentational – the equivalent of ‘emotion work’ (Hochschild, 1983) or ‘presentation of the self’ (Goffman, 1978);
•	prescriptive – which captures the everyday following of occupational feeling rules, but as a professional commitment rather than an explicitly economic act; and
•	philanthropic – which Bolton sees as the giving of ‘that little extra’ during a social exchange in the workplace.

To encompass this array of agendas and motivations, Bolton uses the term ‘emotional management’, subsuming within it Hochschild’s original construct. Under this typology, workers do more than just sell their emotions in a commercial context. They are skilled emotional managers who are able to juggle and synthesize different types of ‘emotion work’ as they move in and out of the different agendas, personal, professional and organizational, which shape their working lives. So, for example, a member of an airline cabin crew gives ‘service with a smile’ (pecuniary) to a passenger asking for their drink to be refilled; then looks sad (presentational) when her fellow crew member tells her she has split up from her partner; then remains calm (prescriptive) when the pilot announces the plane will be flying through turbulence and a nervous flyer needs reassurance; and finally provides genuine reassurance (philanthropic) to a child who is frightened by the bumpy ride – all in the space of 10 minutes! This familiar scenario clearly demonstrates Bolton and Boyd’s contention, with which most of us would freely agree, that it is ‘not always the organisation that defines the emotional agenda’ (2003: 291). Building on Bolton’s (2000a; 2000b) distinction between different types of organizational emotionality, Lewis (2005), for example, explores how and when nurses choose between ‘prescriptive’ and ‘philanthropic’ forms of emotion management, the gendered nature of the resultant behaviours, and their associations with ‘professional’ and ‘caring’ aspects of the nurses’ work. In an alternative if somewhat confusing typology, Miller, Considine and Garner (2007) consider the sources and targets of workplace emotions by adding ‘emotion with work’, ‘emotion at work’ and ‘emotion toward work’ to refer respectively to emotions stemming from interactions with co-workers, emotions arising from non-work sources which are nonetheless experienced within the workplace, and emotions in which work itself is the target of the emotion experienced. These emotion types, said to be drawn from the extant literature, are in addition to the authentic and inauthentic interactions with customers and clients which they refer to in a confusing if minor variation from Hochschild as ‘emotional labour’ and ‘emotional work’. Whilst their work in exploring these emotion types through the analysis of workplace narratives is an interesting and useful addition to the main body of ‘emotion at work’ literature, the typology itself seems to add to the lack of conceptual clarity perceived by Bolton and discussed below.

In a broad review of the field, Bolton (2005) makes an important contribution to the debate surrounding the appropriation of the term ‘emotional labour’ to refer to wider issues of emotional management in professional and caring roles, suggesting that it is an inadequate term to cover all the aspects of emotion management to which it is often applied. So, for example, whilst acknowledging Fineman’s (1993) contribution to our understanding of the role of emotions in organizations, she takes issue with his use of the term ‘emotional labour’ in relation to acts of caring and suggests that there is ‘little evidence of conceptual clarity’ (Bolton, 2005: 54) in his use of the term. She similarly accuses Hearn of using the phrase as ‘a catch-all phrase to describe any and every type of emotion in organisations’ (Bolton, 2005: 54) when he states that ‘in one sense all organisational work, membership and presence is emotion labour … Indeed the quality of being in an organisation – organisation-ness – is itself a form of emotion or emotional labour’ (Hearn, 1993: 161). She similarly contests the application of the term to the professions and to internal relationships between employees within the same organization, again referring to Hochschild’s original job specifications by way of justification. In referring to an emotional labour ‘bandwagon’ and the misuse of the construct in relation to nursing and the legal profession, she may perhaps be hinting at a commercial appropriation of the construct of emotional labour which in some respect parallels the nature of the construct itself.

Whilst, in point of exactitude, we can see and appreciate the distinctions Bolton is making – and can commend her adherence to the original parameters of the construct and Hochschild’s defence of them – we can also see the role this adherence plays in enabling her to promulgate her own typology as a valuable refinement of its predecessor and as a potential barrier to the further development of this important area of knowledge. This refinement is indeed valuable, but extension of the construct to new domains – with some necessary caveats and amendments – can be equally valuable. Intuitively, leadership stands as a discipline which can derive much benefit from innovative attempts to understand its day-today practice and the role of emotions in its successful accomplishment. That the leaders participating in research in this field readily relate to the notion of ‘emotional labour’ and the effort and dissonance of which it is often productive seems to support our adoption of this more narrowly defined term. In a discipline which relies heavily on metaphor for its sense-making, to use ‘emotional labour’ as a metaphor in preference to the more accurate, but less descriptive ‘emotion management’ seems to me to be a forgivable sin. That the contributing authors in this volume have, to a large extent, chosen to work with this metaphor is suggested to be a vindication of the insight it offers even where some of the original niceties are lost. Where those niceties are of analytical significance – as they often are – we can still draw on them for clarity and to locate our work in the existing field. But, in the main, our efforts are directed at moving forward: at synthesizing one area of knowledge with another in order to generate new insights which are greater than the sum of the parts. In this endeavour, we hope not to tread on the toes of the purists amongst those who have followed Hochshild, but to draw on the insights she gave us and to adapt them to our own use.

Leadership and emotional labour

Notwithstanding the later developments surrounding emotional labour, in essence it has remained a creature of the service industry, with the relatively superficial and transient emotional displays which such labour calls forth in this domain. This book considers the more complex ways in which this need to show (or hide) particular emotions translates into job roles – specifically those of leaders or managers – where the relationships are lasting rather than transient, two-way rather than uni-directional, and have complex, ongoing goals rather than straightforward, one-off ones. The book contends that these differences contribute unique characteristics to the nature of the emotional labour required, and expounds and explores this new species within the ‘emotional labour’ genus.

At the same time, it can be argued that leadership theory is at a crossroads. With a rich history of theoretical approaches behind it – from traits to behaviours, leader-focused to follower-constructed – the discipline remains a long way from fully understanding this most complex and varied activity. What recent approaches do recognize, however, is the importance of the ‘human element’. There is much talk of propounding a vision to motivate followers, and the role of leaders as ‘managers of meaning’ (Smircich and Morgan, 1982). The dream of the ‘happy, productive worker’ (Staw, 1996) remains the Holy Grail of organizational research, and the emphasis placed on leadership as the means by which it might be delivered continues to grow. New theories of spiritual leadership (Fry, 2005), authentic leadership (Avolio and Gardner, 2005), and even servant leadership (Spears and Lawrence, 2004) all speak to the emotional component within the leader–follower relationship. This book addresses this emotional component from a new angle – not that of a philosophical proposal, but through a detailed examination of the ‘emotion work’ performed by leaders in order t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: the ‘Managed Heart’
• 2 Leadership as emotional labour: so what’s new?
• 3 Leadership as emotional and compassionate labour: managing the human side of the enterprise
• 4 Getting to the ‘heart’ of leaders doing emotional labour: a methodological, theoretical and empirical contribution
• 5 How leading with emotional labour creates common identities
• 6 The ‘Managed Heart’ of leaders: the role of emotional intelligence
• 7 Truth, authenticity and emotional labour: a practitioner’s perspective
• 8 Middle managers’ emotional labour in disseminating culture change: a case study in the requirement for changing values
• 9 Valuing employees: management rhetoric, employee experiences and the implications for leadership
• 10 Games leaders play: using Transactional Analysis to understand emotional dissonance
• 11 Conclusions: management and the ‘Managed Heart’
• Index