Emotions at work have attracted a fair amount of attention from scientist and practitioners over the past decades. One of the topics is emotional labour which was introduced by Hochschild (1983). The concept of emotional labour has many aspects to it such as surface acting, deep acting, intensity of emotional display, the duration of emotional display, range of emotional display, automatic emotion regulation and many more. Their effects on an employee’s work satisfaction, their self-esteem and psychological well-being (Zapf 2002) are also well documented. How an employee deals with these factors has an influence on the outcomes such as customer satisfaction. Various articles have explored the emotional labour of nurses (Pisaniello …show more content…
In the review of the literature I found that the term “acting” was looked at from two different perspectives. One is Surface Acting and the other is Deep Acting (DA). In surface acting, employees control their emotional expressions superficially. It is usually associated with memorised scripts. For example, an employee may fake a smile when in a bad mood or interacting with a difficult customer. They do it because the rules of the organisation say so. A defence lawyer is under constant scrutiny of the jury while the court is in session. The scrutiny level is higher when the case is high profile and cameras are allowed in the courtroom. In such cases it is impossible to convince the jury about the innocence of one’s clients if the arguments are read out like a script. They have to resort to the other dimension of acting i.e. deep acting. Hochschild (1983) defined ‘‘deep acting’’ as individuals trying to influence what they feel in to ‘‘become’’ the role they are asked to play. But it needs a little modification to apply to the defence lawyer’s case. The defence lawyer has to come across as genuine to the jury while making an argument. That’s the reason why they have to resort to deep acting to win over the …show more content…
Emotional dissonance is a state where the internal feelings of a person do not match the emotions they are expressing. However it would be necessary for the lawyers to deal with emotional dissonance because they cannot express their true feelings towards their colleagues. They interact with colleagues every day and displaying emotions of anger and frustration would strain their relationship. This in turn might affect the lawyer’s other cases in future. Consequently, experiencing emotional dissonance is a necessary element of a lawyer’s life. Having said that, the suppression of one’s true feelings can potentially have a negative impact on the psychological well-being of a