This study analyzes how employees at a university recreation center discursively
construct their experiences of emotional labor, how they conceptualize such behavior in
terms of displaying unfelt emotions and faking in good and bad faith, and what these
discursive constructions reveal about their perceptions of authenticity. The findings
demonstrate that workers construct emotional labor as a natural ability and as performing
a role. People who construct emotional labor as a natural ability depict themselves as the
controller of their workplace emotion. They display unfelt emotions in good faith when
they do so to uphold anotherâÂÂs face, and they believe that they possess a true self.
Employees who construct emotional labor as performing a role view their supervisors as
controller of their workplace emotion. They fake emotions in good faith when doing so
uphold their own face, and they fake in bad faith when it upholds the face of a co-worker
who they feel needs to be disciplined. These people do not possess a sense of authentic
self. They view themselves as multi-faceted and they say that they use social
comparison to determine how to behave in particular situations. These findings reveal
previously unexplored complexities in scholarsâ conceptions of emotional labor and
authenticity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/5005 |
| Date | 25 April 2007 |
| Creators | Haman, Mary Kathryn |
| Contributors | Putnam, Linda L. |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | 543987 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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