There are three elements that ensure the correct performance of emotional labour by employees. First, careful selection process as it is extremely vital to get employees with the right skills and personality for the job. The second element is employee training, including induction training and learning courses. The final element is employee monitoring – it is quite resource-consuming as it involves a close monitoring of employees’ activities in order to ensure that staff show the appropriate emotions and obey display rules.
Display rules Display rules is a powerful instrument that governs emotional labour. Those rules are the guidelines or scripts developed by managers that demonstrate appropriate feelings and emotions which should be displayed by employees (Bolton, 2000). There are two types of rules specified: feeling rules and expression rules which state which feelings and emotions should be displayed and how they should be expressed in a particular setting. Display rules are expressed through implicit rules – the ones that are not written down, and explicit rules – written down scripts employees have to follow. Different organisations have different combinations of those – it may depend on the organisational structure (more bureaucratic ones will have many explicit rules) or the nature of services offered by …show more content…
We also have departmental targets we need to achieve depending on the time scale.” (Smith, 2015)
Emotional labour and display rules
Display rules influence how workers regulate their emotions (Goldberg and Drandey, 2007 in Van Jaarsveld and Poster, 2012). Surprisingly, in the case of this organisation there is no evidence of large amount of explicit rules within the customer service department. According to the research, CSAs have high degree of autonomy in performing the job therefore they were free to decide to which extent they can perform emotional labour.
“There are not that many strict and explicit guidelines on how to deal with the customer, the majority of scripts include technical information regarding contractors, repairs, etc.” (Smith, 2015).
Flexibility of display rules allowed minimal governance of emotional labour within SHT. Despite call-recording, calls are rarely monitored: “I only listen to the recording when a complaint’s logged” (Smith, 2015). This therefore puts less pressure on CSAs who developed their own style, methods and techniques when dealing with customers, even though surface and deep acting might be