Processes of Emotions in Workplace

This week we will be looking at emotions in a workplace. We will also look at various stressors, burnouts, and ways to cope. Emotions are a common thing to have in a workplace (and pretty much everywhere else), and here we will further investigate and understand these terms.

Emotional labor, (feeling for) are jobs in which workers are expected to present certain feelings to satisfy expectations of their role in the organization. Within emotional labor, there are 2 types of acting: surface and deep. Surface acting is being able to smile in any circumstance, while deep acting sympathizes with a client’s stress. Studies show that deep acting causes more stress in the long term. Emotional work (feeling with) involves people who aren’t in the frontline service jobs but hold professional positions in industries such as health care, education, or human services.

Stressors, which are environment factors that are difficult for an individual to deal with usually stems from workloads or life events. Stressors are the cause of burnouts, which are strains that results from ongoing stressors (aka a wearing out from pressures). Maslach has three dimensions of burnouts: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and decreased personal accomplishment respectively. There were several students around me that joked that they were in the second stage of because of the stress that they have been feeling from school recently.

As many of us guessed, there are many physiological, attitudinal, and organizational results such as coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, and lower job satisfaction. BUT there are 3 types of coping. Problem centered involves with dealing with the causes of burnout directly, appraisal centered which is changes one’s perspective of the stressful situation, and emotion centered which deals with the negative affective outcomes of burnout.

So to the classmates who were feeling stressed, don’t worry and keep going! Just a few weeks more!