Relationship of Emotion Labour Strategies with General Well-Being and Work Engagement in Retail Sector Employees

Hochschild (1983) termed regulation of one's emotions to comply with occupational or organizational norms as labor. She defined emotional labor as the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value (Hochschild, 1983).Based on impression management, Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) defined emotional labor as the act of displaying appropriate emotion.Research focuses on strategies which people use to deal with emotion work (e.g., Brotheridge & Lee, 2002; Grandey, 2000). More specifically, they describe antecedents, functions, and consequences of two main strategies which Hochschild (1983) called surface acting (changing emotional display while leaving affective state untouched) and deep acting (changing affective state itself).Researchers proposed that employees perform emotional labor through two types of acting mechanism: surface acting and deep acting. (Hochschild, 1983; Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993).Surface acting involves employees simulating emotions that are not actually felt, by changing their outward appearances (i.e., facial expression, gestures, or voice tone) when exhibiting required emotions. Using surface acting technique, people alter outward expression of emotion in service of altering their inner feelings. Surface acting is a discrepancy between felt and displayed emotion (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993).Another acting technique is deep acting. Deep acting can be classified as (1) exhorting feeling, whereby one actively attempts to evoke or suppress an emotion, and (2) trained imagination, whereby one actively invokes thoughts, images, and memories to induce associated emotion (thinking of a wedding to feel happy or a funeral to feel sad). In other words, employees use their training or past experiences to help conjure up appropriate emotions or responses (empathy, cheerfulness) for a given scene (Kruml & Geddes, 2000).General well being is defined as subjective feelings of contentment, happiness, satisfaction with life's experiences and of one's role in world of work, sense of achievement, utility, belongingness, no distress, dissatisfaction or worry etc. Well-being is a positive outcome that is meaningful for people and for many sectors of society, because it tells us that people perceive that their lives are going well. Well-being generally includes global judgments of life satisfaction and feelings ranging from depression to joy.* Well-being integrates mental health (mind) and physical health (body) resulting in more holistic approaches to disease prevention and health promotion.* Well-being is a valid population outcome measure beyond morbidity, mortality, and economic status that tells us how people perceive their life is going from their own perspective.* Well-being is an outcome that is meaningful to public.* Advances in psychology, neuroscience, and measurement theory suggest that well-being can be measured with some degree of accuracy.Individuals with high levels of well-being are more productive at work and are more likely to contribute to their communitiesKahn defined personal as ...harnessing of organization member's selves to their work roles: in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, emotionally and mentally during role performances (Kahn, 1990). Work engagement is defined as a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. Vigor is characterized by high levels of energy and mental resilience while working, willingness to invest effort in one's work, and persistence even in face of difficulties; dedication by being strongly involved in one's work, and experiencing a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenge; and absorption by being fully concentrated and happily engrossed in one's work, whereby time passes quickly and one has difficulties with detaching oneself from work. …