abstract: Municipal courtrooms are brimming with a variety of positive and negative emotions from defendants who are primarily encountering the criminal justice system for the first time. Municipal court judges and bailiffs must work together and find ways to communicate important information about courtroom processes to up to 70-120 defendants a day. This dissertation investigates how municipal court judges and bailiffs from two municipal courthouses respond to three organizational challenges associated with emotion--defendant confusion about courtroom processes, handling high caseloads while treating defendants as customers of the court, and managing the serious and tedious emotional moods of the courtroom environment. Using qualitative methods of observation and informal and formal interviews, this dissertation analyzes how emotion cycles between judges and bailiffs help give sense to and break sense of defendants while simultaneously helping them navigate the challenges of their work. Findings detail the nature of work in municipal court--explaining the challenges associated with emotion that judges and bailiffs face on a daily basis. The data also describes the emotional roles that judges and bailiffs employ in the courtroom. The judges' emotional roles include tension relievers, order enforcers, and care takers. Bailiffs' emotional roles comprise rule enforcers, toxin handlers, and do gooders. The heart of the analysis explores how judges and bailiffs give sense to defendants when unexpected situations manifest in the courtroom and break sense of defendants who hold incorrect or less favored beliefs about courtroom procedures. The emotional displays and responses of judges, bailiffs, primary defendants (defendants before the judge), and third party defendants (those watching in the audience) enable sensegiving and sensebreaking to occur. The emotion cycles allow courtroom staff to impact the sensemaking process of defendants in a fast and efficient manner. Theoretical implications include extensions of emotion cycle research through a consideration of the displays and responses of primary agents, intermediate agents, and primary recipients of emotional displays. Practical implications describe how specific training practices and space for employee discussion could enhance the workplace wellness of judges and bailiffs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication 2012

Unjust customer complaints are increasing, liberal redress policies are becoming more commonplace, and front line employees are expected to smile and just deal with fictitious complaints with redress and a sincere smile.  Is this justly so? This research helps to fill the current gaps in complaint, justice, and emotional labor research by empirically examining employee perceptions of perceived opportunistic versus perceived legitimate complaints.       This research completed one hotel and one restaurant study using  a 2 x 2 between-subjects experimental design to examine complaint type (opportunistic/ legitimate) and perceived organizational support (high/low).   Data was collected from a large reputable market research firm. Results find that employees from both studies experience statistically significantly lower perceptions of procedural, interactional, and distributive justice when dealing with opportunistic as opposed to legitimate complaints.  Perceptions of distributive justice statistically significantly increased employee\'s emotive effort and emotional dissonance.  Additionally, for all of the relationships in the hotel study and with distributive justice in the restaurant study, perceived organizational support had no significant effect on employee perceptions of justice or emotional dissonance or effort.   Managerial implications of employee justice perceptions and customer complaint policies are discussed. / Ph. D.

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The literature regarding organizations, labor control, and emotional labor suggests that the labor process within the service sector is fundamentally different from that of the manufacturing sector because the incorporation of a customer into the labor process necessitates an additional type of labor — namely, emotional labor — to facilitate the interaction. This study demonstrates that emotiona1labor is both heterogenous and dynamic. It is influenced not only by the specific service occupation under investigation, but also by the organizational context in which it is simultaneously manufactured and constrained. Emotional labor enactment varies between organizational contexts, among cashiers employed at the same store, and within the individual. Cashiers are able to shift between six distinct emotional labor enactment styles to accomplish their work: the conversationalist, the minimalist, the pretender, the avoider, the confronter, and the contender. This study also demonstrates that as the size of grocery establishments increase, labor control systems are altered to accommodate the growth which, in turn, influences emotional labor . Increasing formalization of emotional labor directives not only promotes uniformity but can also generate variation in the form of cashier resistance. Emotional labor commitment can be enhanced if the labor control system fosters internalization of organizational expectations among the cashiers. Importantly, potential negative effects of emotional labor can be lessened if strategies for handling the competing and oftentimes contradictory demands are effectively disseminated. / Master of Science

This study examines whether front-of-house workers' experiences of emotional labor affected their turnover intentions while working a food service job during COVID. To investigate, I asked a sample of 14 tipped workers and two general managers about their experiences working in restaurants during the lockdown and reopening phases of COVID. I learned about participants' experiences working and their reasons for staying and quitting their job during the reopening phases. From interviews, I collected data on workers' perceptions of health mandates, their customer interactions, and their own assessments of COVID-related risks. I analyzed interview data to assess how organizational changes during COVID affected workers' performances of emotional labor and whether their reasons for leaving related to emotional labor being altered. Findings show that workers had to manage customers' heightened emotions while handling their own. From decreased income, increased negative emotions, and mask interference, workers' experiences of emotional labor were significantly changed. Importantly, organizational changes made many workers uncomfortable in their workplace and in following organizational demands, both related and unrelated to emotional labor. These experiences led seven participants to ultimately quit and six to desire to quit without doing so. I conclude that emotional labor was intensified for workers' whose wage predominantly rested on their capitalization of interactions with customers. Evidence reveals how organizational changes led to increased feelings of stress, emotional burnout, and exhaustion. However, the widespread occurrence of these feelings and intensified emotional labor make it unclear whether increased and intensified emotional labor directly created or heavily influenced desires to quit. / Master of Science / My project aims to ask restaurant workers about their experiences working through COVID. Many people called workers "lazy" or complained about them quitting to use government assistance. However, I believe that workers quit for reasons unrelated to individual laziness or reliance on assistance. To investigate, I asked front of house restaurant workers about their experiences interacting with customers and their job conditions. I also asked them what it was like for them, as restaurant workers, to enforce mandates while trying to keep a customer happy for a tip. I interviewed 16 people that worked in a restaurant between November 2020-2021. I chose this period because during this year millions of workers were quitting their jobs. After interviewing workers, I analyzed what they said to see whether interactions with customers and their efforts to maintain tips pushed them to desire quitting. I found that workers' experiences in restaurants were changed greatly by COVID. Specifically, their incomes decreased, interactions were seriously impacted by the mask, and work became more emotionally exhausting. Many of the workers I interviewed wanted to quit while working with a mask on their face. It was clear that working during COVID was the only option for many of the workers I interviewed, and it often cost them their mental health and well-being to stay financially stable.

The term “social competence” is widely used by organizations in job advertisements, despite the problems of making a unified definition of it. The purpose of this study is to investigate which features the organizations require, why organizations require them and how the assessment is implemented for recruitment. To answer the purpose of this study, eight qualitative interviews conducted with recruiters from four different staffing agencies. Further a literature study was performed to define the concept of “social competence” and its meaning, in order to later connect this to the result. Based on this, the term “social competence” will be further studied using emotional labor and social capital. From the results, it was found that the organizations' demands for features in terms of “social competence” was communication, teamwork, commitment and flexibility. It was also found that the required social features could be linked to the definitions developed through the literature study.