Conor Sheehan

Customer facing roles in hospitality and other service domains have long been associated with emotional challenge and the need for deployment of interpersonal skills in varied and often complex situations. The daily uplifts and ‘hassles’ experienced as a consequence of social exchange have been
reported to engage and repel respectively those who work in the service sector, determining individuals’ immediate behavioural outcomes and shaping their attitudes that influence their longer term commitment and well-being. Over the last three decades, an expanding body of literature has emerged relating to the concept of service agents’ ‘emotional self-management’ in the workplace, itsdynamic complexity and its relationship with occupational health and well-being.

This article reports on the development of a research project proposal which intends to further investigate the significance of emotional self-management for well-being in service work. It initially outlines the aims of the research, which relate to the development of understanding of individuals’ perspectives on their emotional self-management and the personal resources they may deploy to meet the varying social demands inherent in service work. This is accompanied by a brief review of
relevant literature which supports the study’s rationale. It then reflects upon the relevance of the interpretative phenomenological paradigm to the proposed methodology. It is also suggests how interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) might assist in the understanding of respondents’ subjective experiences of emotional self-management and their well-being in increasingly complex and unpredictable workplaces. Later the rationale for the selection of respondents from ‘cross–
sectoral’ service backgrounds is discussed in terms of their potential contribution to the depth and roundedness of the findings. A brief commentary is then offered on some ethical aspects relating the protection of vulnerable respondents. The article concludes with a summary of the key methodological issues that will need on-going monitoring.

This study investigates service workers’ experiences of managing their emotions and how they make sense of these in relation to their perceived well-being. It responds to calls within the sociology of service work literature for a more definitive focus upon the dynamic complexity of service agents’ ‘emotional self-management’ and their self-care across, in addition to within, specific occupational contexts.

The still novel qualitative methodology, interpretative phenomenological analysis (‘IPA’) was adopted because of its emphasis upon gathering experiential data from a first person viewpoint. This choice of IPA was innovative, not only because of its virtual invisibility in service research to date, but also because it was methodologically augmented using artefact elicitation technique. A purposive, non-random, sample of twelve participants was drawn, six  from each of two specific occupational groups; air cabin crew and nurses, with respondents participating in a series of in-depth, loosely structured interviews over an extended timeframe. The findings revealed that three key relationships lay at the heart of how participants made sense of their emotional experiences; service agents’ themselves, their interaction with working colleagues and those whom they served. Relationships were played out within dynamic climates of authenticity, falseness, loyalty or betrayal and often interpreted by respondents in terms of their inherent degrees of truth, trust, dignity and pride.

This study contributes to contextual and theoretical understanding by offering fresh insights on service agents’ emotional experiences as mediating influences in their socially constructed sense of selves and their well-being. This is one of very few studies which emphasise idiographic contexts within the broader patterns of worker–customer relations, transcending the traditionally delineated occupational boundaries of nursing and commercial service work. New knowledge has been created by considering individuals’ feelings about their work in this way thus prompting a reconsideration of emotion effort in terms of its complexity, challenge and occupational context.

This study offers a contemporary perspective on the factors affecting the emotional self-management of airline service agents within an increasingly challenging work environment. The methodological approach combined a review of the contemporary literature on ‘emotion’ work with exploratory primary research involving longitudinal focus groups and ‘life history’ interviews (Ladkin 2004) with purposively selected respondents. The findings suggested that intensifying job demands and deteriorating working conditions continue to increase the alienating psychological costs of performing emotional labour for air cabin crew. These costs appear greater where ‘emotional reciprocity’ is absent and emotional dissonance is evident. Some crew, however, continue to make emotional effort autonomously and spontaneously, and these incidences appear linked to personality trait characteristics and positive service orientation. This work offers a rounded contextualization of respondents’ life experiences with their emotional self-management challenges at work. Future research could further explore the ‘reciprocity dynamic’ as an enabler of service agents’ emotional self-management.

Keywords
cabin crew
emotion effort
emotional labour
emotional self-management
emotional reciprocity
occupational health