Exploring attitude with respect to emotional labour at work

If we want our people to buy into any business changes, such as improved processes, quality goals or productivity improvements, and be really passionate and committed to these changes, we need to engage our people emotionally. Traditional rational engagement strategies such as “change management or “quality compliance” are no longer cutting it with either employees or customers who want to be engaged emotionally. The enterprise stakeholders are telling us they need more from their engagement with us - they need emotional connection with their enterprise.

Emotions impact almost all the activities that a person performs, and as a significant amount of the time is spent by an individual at work, so it becomes all the more important to understand the role that emotions have on the performance of an individual. The significance of emotions at work increases even further where the job involves interaction with the customer, as in the case of service sector. The service sector requires employees to continuously interact with the customers, and mismanagement of emotions in such a case can be disastrous for both the employee and the organization. As a result the requirements of the job, coerce the employee to manage their emotions according to what is suitable for a comfortable customer experience. This aspect is termed as emotional labour and is analyzed by the present research in depth.

The concept of emotional labour is experienced by various employees across different industries and sectors, however service sector and particularly hospitality industry experiences almost all the time. The research has been directed to understand how hospitality industry addresses the subject of emotional labour, and how important is engagement of employees. Moreover an engaged employee is an asset in the present scenario and particularly for the hospitality sector, employees are the key tool of addressing customer needs.