We are now turning our attention to emotional work. As I mentioned, masking and emotional work are often interchangeable in the research. Emotional work always begins with masking, but not all masking will include emotional labour.
Flickr.com: Scott_trip2
What is emotional work? It is modulating and suppressing your own emotional and logical thoughts often while absorbing poorly modulated and highly-expressed emotions from another and then working to help that other person pull themselves into a more modulated and manageable space. Emotional work is not purely in reaction to a dysregulated person you must placate and it may also be a pre-emptive set of modulations and behaviours you would apply to ensure you are not the focus of not meeting expectations in some way.
There is a lot of emotional work to be had in the raising of children. Studies continue to show women perform the majority of emotional work in the home, with the family and at work.
The impact of emotional work on your health and wellbeing is significant as well.
And while this paper quoted above speaks to the concept of personality traits playing a part in how emotional work in a job setting is more likely to lead to burnout in some as opposed to others, this is more a set of presumptions linking distinct and limited research data points. The researchers highlight Type A behaviour pattern (TABP), with a propensity for irritation, frustration, impatience and competitiveness, as being more susceptible to adverse health outcomes, particularly coronary issues. And that the research also shows this cluster of behaviour patterns correlates with increased feelings of job tension. We do not have any link that feeling tension on the job is the result of any emotional labour demands nor, if it is linked, that the TABP person is then subsequently prone to adverse health events due to emotional labour demands that lead to burnout or whether it is their pattern of irritability, regardless of emotional labour demands.
Having a sense of self-efficacy in the workplace may modulate the impacts of having to embark on significant emotional labour in your job, but it is our usual misguided focus on the individual rather than the system that results in us missing the big links that likely connect emotional labour with burnout and adverse health outcomes.
The focus needs to turn to reciprocity and social contracts as a likely significant link to burnout and adverse health outcomes when it comes to emotional labour on the job. Emotional labour is often a rewarding endeavour if the effort you make to modulate and suppress your initial emotions and thoughts is reciprocated by a modulation and appreciation of your effort from the other person.
If, however, you must suppress your emotions and thoughts to adhere to policies or work procedures that will only serve to make clients and customers agitated and unhappy, then you will feel a hopeless sense that your emotional labour cannot be reciprocated by the client or customer and you will inevitably face their agitation and unhappiness no matter how much effort you put into smiling and appeasing.
Or, conversely, you suppress your emotions and thoughts to try to ease the suffering, distress and frustration of a client and they reciprocate with abuse and violence. There are many caring and service jobs where this is often the reaction from the client, and while it may be possible to cognitively understand that the reaction is coming from vulnerable, brittle or otherwise compromised individuals, the lack of reciprocity will deplete your reserves.
These unreciprocated interactions can be grossly worsened when your own organizational leaders fail to recognize or support your efforts and perhaps “side with” a client, or admonish you for failing to successfully apply the emotional labour to achieve the desired organizational outcome.
Your emotional labour might entirely be exercised to appease organizational leaders and colleagues and you have no customer-facing piece to your job. It is no less energy depleting to manage leaders and colleagues than it is customers and clients.
In the end, self-efficacy is a luxury that not everyone can exercise in every situation. Self-efficacy is the ability to draw boundaries around the emotional work done for others. However, drawing boundaries will always come with consequences.
Several years ago, with a specific lens on navigating recovery from an eating disorder, I touched on the topic of countermoves. In most cases boundaries are not well-received by those who believe they are entitled to your emotional work. They will countermove to undermine the boundary you have set.
In professional settings, the countermove may be to outright fire you and being in a position to risk that outcome is a luxury.
However, the current environment is offering a level of freedom to employees and workers that may mean you could re-evaluate how difficult it would be to find another job if you set a boundary and you are fired for it.
Another more feasible outcome today than before the pandemic is that you set a boundary and it sticks. While there is much in the news on the Big Quit and the Great Resignation in the media these days, what is not mentioned quite so much is that the vast undercount of COVID-related deaths along with the further 20-30% of those unable to return to the workforce due to long COVID, means far fewer individuals in the workforce today in 2022 compared to 2019. And then there are those ages 60 to 70 who were actively in the workforce with no intention of retiring who have now retired because the risk to them from the ongoing pandemic, especially given the age-related risk of adverse outcomes should they contract the virus, is no longer worth continued employment. All of this results in more jobs than available workers.
Emotional work is not a bad thing if it aligns with your own values for helping others, but if the reciprocation is not there—either the individuals you are helping are not responsive or, perhaps somewhat more onerous, your leadership is completely unsupportive of your efforts with clients and customers, then either set the boundaries and see if they hold, or be prepared to move on.
I have emphasized that environmental and reciprocity aspects, and not personality traits, will play into whether emotional work will lead to burnout and negative health outcomes.
However, the cognitive processing that the brain applies to use set shifting, masking and emotional work to achieve required outcomes in a workplace will vary from one person to the next. So while your personality may not correlate with how hard set shifting, masking and emotional work in your job is for you, the processing you may be applying might mean you are more drained than others putting in the same outward set shifting, masking and emotional work as you do.
We will look at this next week.