Managing People In Organization For Service Work

Emotion Management in an Organization

Discuss about the Managing People in Organization for Service Work.

1. Management of emotions in an organization is practiced to make the employees adopt the correct emotional resources that is required for the organizational environment and promotes work activities. The main objective of managing emotions of the employees is to know and optimize the emotional condition of employees. The emotional management is done at two level, personal or subjective level and interpersonal or social level. At personal level, it refers to the capacity of self-control, the ability to administrate the negative and positive emotions and the emotional intelligence (Posthuma 2012). The interpersonal or social level emotions refers to the emotional changes between clients and employees; and between leaders and employees  

Managing emotions plays an important role for the managers to cope up with the employee’s performance and meet the changes in the business environment. The organization coach and train the employee’s interpersonal skills so that they work effectively (Connelly, Gaddis and Helton 2013). If the emotions of the employees are suppressed then it may lead to negative consequences as they lead to outburst to the co-workers. However, the organization does manipulate the emotions from their end to achieve the target of the company.

The organization tries to influence the emotions of the individuals to reduce the tensions among the group and to achieve the goal of the group in favour of organization. The managers manipulate emotions to create the desired work culture in the organization. The managers generally use several tactics to manipulate emotions (Thiel, Connelly and Griffith 2012). One such tactics use of arguments to push the other employees unintentionally so that he or she behave as per the requirement of the organization, Some of other tactics are form secret networks, prevent building trust and helping other person at work, hold the wrong information and interpret the rules in their own way and be ambiguous. The manipulation of emotions does cause deterioration of relationship among the employer and employee. Sometimes the managers try to manipulate the employee’s emotions to meet their interest which may lead to exploitative, deceptive, abusive results in the organization.

If the managers desires to enforce positive action of the employees by manipulating emotions, then his behaviour will include praises, superficial, sympathy, char, facial expression, driving attentions etc. On the contrary, the managers negative enforcement like yelling, nagging, threats on the employees lead to fall in their performance.

Managing Emotions with conscious practices

2. The emotions of the employees at the workplace can be managed through conscious practices which are explained through the definition of emotional labour and the motivation theory of Herzberg. Emotion labour refers to the effort needed to have the desired emotion during the interpersonal transactions. The emotional expression of the employees is determined by the social environment (Mulki et al. 2015). The different dimensions of emotional labor are intensity of emotions, frequency of interactions, different varieties of emotions required and conflicts of emotions. All these are required to manage through conscious practices of the employees and employers.

The emotions can be regulated at two points. First at the supreme point, the situations can be modified to adjust the emotions, the other are deployment of attention and make cognitive change. It involves making adjustment in the situation that induces emotional changes. The emotions of the employees can be in form of anger or joy, greeting people with showing delight or smile. The organization manages such emotions through training the employees in their behaviour towards clients. They train them to look pleasant in front of guest and not to show resistant at work which has a negative impact on other workers. The managers also counsel the employees who show intense emotions to reduce negative impact on other workers.

In this context Herzberg two-factor theory can be explained where the factors explaining job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are discussed. The performance and satisfaction of job is related to the emotional management of the employees. If the company takes care of factors that decrease job dis-satisfaction and the factors that increase job satisfaction then the emotions of the employees can be controlled to a large extent.   

       

Figure 2: Herzberg Two- Factor Theory of Motivation

Source: (Zagelmeyer et al. 2016)

The figure 2 gives the details of the factors which the organization should consider to decrease and the factors that should be considered to increase to reduce job dis-satisfaction and increase job-satisfaction

3. Subjective experience refers to conscious experience that an individual have and it may be different for different person. Every individual in an organization has different behavioural pattern and emotions. The management of the organization can bring subjective changes in the behavioural pattern by practicing the management of emotion of the employees (Kaplan et al. 2014). The emotions of the people in an organization have an influence on the disposition of task, personality of the people and decision making capabilities. Management can develop a flow of positive emotions by encouraging the employees to complete their task, by providing rewards and incentives on achievement of the employees and making occasional celebration at work place to energise the employee mentally so that they perform better. Management can also motivate the employees to perform better in their work as explained by Maslow Theory of Motivation.

Subjective Experience and Motivation Theory

Figure1: Maslow Theory of Motivation

(Source: Levi 2016)

According to the Maslow Theory, the employees can be motivated if their basic needs, psychological needs and self-fulfilment needs are taken care of by the organization

Management can reduce the impact of negative influence on the subjective experience of the people by regulating their emotional behaviour through several practices like counselling, training, avoidance of outburst of emotions and by creating congenial environment in the work place. Management reduces the negative emotions of the people by focusing on problem oriented strategies (Levi 2016). They look for solution to any problems that reduces the work efficiency of the people with surety

Management can improve the interpersonal relations with the employees by managing their emotions and taking measures that develop trust and loyalty of customer. It influences the subjective experience and the workers get attach to the organization and perform good by controlling negative outburst of emotion.

4. The emotional labour refers to regulate the emotions to have controlled emotions and feelings at work place There are several employees who need to act professionally when dealing with rude customer and has to control their emotional outburst due to the rude behaviour of the customer. There are mainly two types of emotion labour, deep acting and surface acting. Deep acting refers to the practice of trying to feel a particular emotion that is think in their mind (Gao et al.2013). For example, John feels good when he thinks about playing football in the rainy reason. So when going to deal with customers, he use to think in mind about playing football in the rainy season and be in happy mood so that he would respond to the customer’s queries with enthusiasm and politeness.

The other type of emotional labour is surface acting which refers to the situation when the people have to fake their emotions to meet certain rules of organization and society. For example, John was very sad due to his mother’s sickness and was really difficult for him to concentrate on work. But he made himself look jolly and do the work happily and efficiently without letting anyone in the office know about his mother’s illness.

The emotion labour helps to understand how the employees can handle the upheaval of emotions at work due to several adversities at work that hurts their feelings. The opposite of this is emotional dissonance that shows the incapability of the employees to control their emotions (Brunetto et al. 2014). The actual emotional outburst become hindrance to their performance in job and obstructs their appraisal in the organization. Hence deep acting and surface acting should be utilized by the employees to control their emotions and behave according to the requirement of the organization so that their performance improves and they grow along with the growth of an organization. The employees who are able to practice emotional labour actually grow to the larger height than those who are emotional dissonance.

Emotion Labour Management

5. There are several theories and studies of group psychology that supports the belief of being more productive and creative when working in team than individual while others do not support the belief. In theory the Groupthink is the most famous theory where brainstorming is considered to be ideal for any complicated problem. However, in reality, brainstorming among the experts actually stops them to share their ideas due to difference of opinion and rigidity towards innovative ideas (Biron and Van 2012). On the contrary, the other theory of Social Pressure shows that the behaviour of one person in the group has its influence on the other person and this is how the group grows. Similarly, in company it is called as company culture, where if majority of the people believes in doing task on time then others and especially the newcomers also follows it.

The theory group reject outsiders’ states that the group does not listen to the outsiders. They do exactly what they internally decide and follow the norms of the group. The Gossips theory states that, gossips are good for the group as it help in exchange of ideas and bring the members close to each other and understand each other thought process in a better way (Stewart and Shamdasani 2014). Lastly, the halo effect theory states that it impacts the decision making of the team. Always it does not result in right decision and so to overcome it, the group has to be aware of the halo effect and the decision should be based on data.

Hence different theories have viewed the team work effectiveness differently. However, it can be said that team work does give effective results if the each member contributes honestly to the task and keep aside their emotions for bringing positive output of the task given to the group.

6. With reference to theories of group psychology, explain how the behaviour of people in organization is influenced by group dynamics.

Group dynamics explains the behavioural and attitudinal features of a group. It discusses the manner in which groups are formed and the reason for which the group are formed. It explains the development of the groups which involves different stages like, storming, norming, forming, performing and adjourning (Sherif 2015). The development of these stages defines the behaviour of the people in the group which gets automatically followed by them. If the group development is done properly then the behaviour of the people in the group can be controlled.

The group dynamics also consists of group structure, size, norms, roles, and cohesiveness (Raza and Bengtsson 2014). Each of the feature works for making the group efficient and productive. If the structure of the group is properly designed in terms of its size, norms and roles of each member in the group then it will develop the cohesiveness among the members of the group and the group will perform productively and effectively.

Figure 3: An Optimum Model of Group Dynamics

Source: Levi, 2016

In brief, group dynamics can be effective if the trust at the individual level, cohesiveness and adaptability at the group level and shared functions of the group at the organizational level is properly handled. The proper management of group dynamics will result in efficient contribution of the group member and thus brings effective results

With reference to the group psychology theories, if the group dynamics are done properly then the theories may be successful in predicting the actual behaviour of the group in reality (Haslam et al. 2014). Hence the success of the theories of group psychology depends on the effective formation of group dynamics. Further, group dynamics depends on managing the trust of the group members and develop cohesiveness within the group so that each member adopts the changes in the group and share their work with delight and effectiveness.

References

Biron, M. and van Veldhoven, M., 2012. Emotional labour in service work: Psychological flexibility and emotion regulation. Human Relations, 65(10), pp.1259-1282.

Brunetto, Y., Shacklock, K., Teo, S. and Farr-Wharton, R., 2014. The impact of management on the engagement and well-being of high emotional labour employees. The International Journal of Human Resource Management,25(17), pp.2345-2363.

Connelly, S., Gaddis, B. and Helton-Fauth, W., 2013. A closer look at the role of emotions in transformational and charismatic leadership.Transformational and Charismatic Leadership: The Road Ahead 10th Anniversary Edition (Monographs in Leadership and Management, Volume 5) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 5, pp.299-327.

Gao, L., Guo, J.L., Fan, C. and Liu, X.J., 2013. Individual and group dynamics in purchasing activity. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 392(2), pp.343-349.

Haslam, S.A., van Knippenberg, D., Platow, M.J. and Ellemers, N. eds., 2014. Social identity at work: Developing theory for organizational practice. Psychology Press.

Kaplan, S., Cortina, J., Ruark, G., LaPort, K. and Nicolaides, V., 2014. The role of organizational leaders in employee emotion management: A theoretical model. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(3), pp.563-580.

Levi, D., 2016. Group dynamics for teams. Sage Publications.

Mulki, J.P., Jaramillo, F., Goad, E.A. and Pesquera, M.R., 2015. Regulation of emotions, interpersonal conflict, and job performance for salespeople.Journal of Business Research, 68(3), pp.623-630.

Posthuma, R.A., 2012. Conflict management and emotions. International Journal of Conflict Management, 23(1), pp.4-5.

Raza-Ullah, T. and Bengtsson, M., 2014, January. Emotions in paradoxical inter-firm relationships: A conceptual framework. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2014, No. 1, p. 15851). Academy of Management.

Sherif, M., 2015. Group conflict and co-operation: Their social psychology(Vol. 29). Psychology Press.

Stewart, D.W. and Shamdasani, P.N., 2014. Focus groups: Theory and practice (Vol. 20). Sage publications.

Thiel, C.E., Connelly, S. and Griffith, J.A., 2012. Leadership and emotion management for complex tasks: Different emotions, different strategies. The Leadership Quarterly, 23(3), pp.517-533.

Ward, J. and McMurray, R., 2015. The Dark Side of Emotional Labour. Routledge.

Zagelmeyer, S., Sinkovics, R.R., Sinkovics, N. and Kusstatscher, V., 2016. Exploring the link between management communication and emotions in mergers and acquisitions. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences/Revue Canadienne des Sciences de l’Administration.