Fake Smiles, Genuine Headaches: The Toll of Emotional Labor

We’ve all seen (or maybe we’ve been) the cashier at the check-out line wearing a fake “customer service” smile and dealing with angry customers, but it turns out that faking emotions for the benefit of others can have a negative impact on our health.

Sarah Riforgiate, an associate professor of communication, is wrapping up new research that suggests that the emotional labor that employees perform as part of their job can have physical and physiological effects. But, she added, those effects often disappear if we’re genuinely happy to wear that customer service smile.

Riforgiate explained her research and implored us all: Please be nice to your cashiers, flight attendants, and waiters so they can respond genuinely.

Sarah Riforgiate

First things first: What exactly is emotional labor?

A sociologist named Arlie Hochschild founded the theory of emotional labor. The original theory addresses the way in which we work to perform emotionally for the benefit of commerce. Hochschild originally studied airline flight attendants and bill collectors. Airline flight attendants had to communicate that they were friendly, nice and sometimes even had to accept some customer harassment. Bill collectors had to fake crassness and meanness to intimidate people to collect money.

Through that study, Hochschild found that when we perform emotions, it takes work. What’s interesting is we often do two types of emotional labor. There’s the first type, called surface acting, where we fake emotions. For example, “I’m pretending to smile and be nice to you. But I don’t feel any affection toward you; I’m just doing my job.”

Then there’s the second type, deep-acting, which is when we re-frame the way that we think about an interaction so that we genuinely feel the emotion. At Disneyland, the happiest place on earth, there might be employees faking emotions, but there might also be employees thinking, “This is the greatest job because I’m helping people have this wonderful experience. I want them to be happy so I’m doing these things because I really care about these people’s experience.”

What were you and your coauthors looking for during your research?

My coauthors are Satoris Howard from Oregon State University, Clive Fullagar from Kansas State University, and Mathias Simmons from U.S. Army Research Institute. We were invited into a technology development company to conduct the study. Technology employees spend a lot of time behind their desk. They’re not necessarily interacting face-to-face with customers. We wanted to see if there was emotional labor present in just an everyday workplace, and if employees who changed their communication by doing emotional labor had any kind of physiological or psychological consequences.

We had employees participate in a daily diary study for two weeks. Every day, they reported how tired they felt, how much they had to fake emotions, how much they felt different emotions. Then we asked ourselves, did this emotional labor have any effect?

And did it?

What we found was that surface acting, like when you’re pretending to your coworkers that you’re happy and you’re not really happy, can lead to negative physiological and psychological effects. If you look at the first time point and the end time point for those two weeks, surface acting was associated with employees reporting more burnout.

But the negative consequences are not as likely when employees genuinely feel the emotions. What’s interesting is since this is a web development company, if employees felt an emotion but they were working online, it’s quite possible they stepped away from their computer, took a deep breath, and didn’t have to fake emotions. They could respond later with a thoughtful response. So the way that we use technology might be a way of mitigating some of that demand for surface acting, which could make for happier and healthier employees.

What kind of physical affects did the employees notice?

Headaches, not feeling well, colds. Employees just didn’t feel as well that day, or weren’t responding in ways that they would have if they were in their best physical health. However, small things can take a toll over time.

You mentioned using technology to mitigate the toll of emotional labor. Is there anything else that workplaces can do to help their employees?

Employers can give employees uninterrupted time to work. There have been studies indicating that allowing employees to do their job without that constant engagement can buffer some of the stress. Also, companies can have managers be aware of how much interaction employees are having with each other, and give employees space and time to not have to perform emotionally.

Employers can also consider their hiring practices and goodness of fit. If deep acting emotional labor (truly feeling the emotions) is not creating as many negative consequences, then employers should screen prospective employees and hire people that are a good fit for the organization. That way, the employees will have to do less of that surface acting (faking emotions) because communicating emotions will feel natural to them.

What can employees do?

One thing they can do is be aware of when they think they’re faking emotions and see if there are ways to step away from that. Employees should at least be aware if emotional labor is causing stress for them so they can come up with other strategies that might work for their communication.

One takeaway from this research seems to be that we all need to be nicer to the people who are paid to be nice to us.

One of the things that I take away from my research is that emotions are so fluid. We need to think about the ways that we communicate emotions and the impact our communication has on others.

So yes, be nice to customer service people.

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science