Effects Of Emotional Labor Strategies On Performance

Traditional labor is divided into brain labor and manual labor, and the present study is to discuss the third type—emotional labor. Collecting debt is a complex interpersonal process, where emotional labor manifests most significantly. The present study discusses emotional labor in collecting debt by three levels, based on the practical work of collecting debt of credit card.The first level is to answer why studying emotional labor strategies. Many factors influence the performance, and the present study explains the reasons for choosing emotional labor as the critical factor in interpersonal work such as debt collection by the evident in the investigation and field. In the first part, the investigation of113debt collector by questionnaires shows that emotional labor has predictive effect on collection debt, but trust of others hasn’t; however, the investigation cannot uncover the essence until it combines with Grandey’s (2003) emotional labor theory to find that emotional labor is the critical factor. In the second part, by conducting a qualitative analysis on the field observation ofl6debt collector and530audio recordings of successful debt collection, it proves that debt collection is the process of emotional labor, which plays a critical factor in it, from three aspects of standards, organizational requirements and dimensions of emotional labor. The second level is to answer how emotional labor strategies influence the performance. It needs more precise experiments to measure at what extent emotional labor influences the work performance. Therefore, the present study controls irrelevant variables and designs three experiments to discuss the effects of emotional labor strategies on performance. Considering the employees need to suppress their emotions in the use of emotional labor strategies, in order to distinct the emotional labor strategies’ influence on performance more accurately, the first experiment is to discuss the effects of emotions on debt collection, which also provides the basis of subsequent research. We selected92participants, and used single factor experiment between-subject design to discuss the positive, negative, neutral emotions’ influence on performance in collecting task on net. The results indicate that personal emotions have significant predictive effect on quoted price, with participants with positive emotions having lower quoted price and more final concession and participants with negative emotions more willing to negotiate again with the opponent in the future. The second one162participants had attend the task, we used a2(emotions:positive and negative) x3(emotional labor strategies:superficial acting, deep acting, automatically adjust) between-subject design to discuss the effects of personal emotional labor strategies on performance, and the results indicate that when employee’s personal emotions disappear after applying emotional labor strategies, emotional labor strategy has significant predictive effect on quoted price and final concession, among which self-regulating strategy best, deep impersonation comes second and superficial impersonation third with low quoted price and great concession. In the third experiment, we selected130participants and used a2(emotions:positive, negative) x2(authentic:yes, no) between-subject design to discuss the contagion of opponent’s emotional labor strategies on performance, and the results show that the sincerity of opponents has no significant influence on objective indicators (the value of quoted price and concession) of negotiation and subjective indicators (satisfaction of results and impression of opponents), but opponent’s internal emotions have significant predictive effect on subjective indicators.The third level is to answer how emotional labor strategies apply in work place. The present study, taking credit card debt collection as an example, analyzes the data by grounded theory and discusses the application of emotional labor strategies from four aspects of extents, manifestations, differentiation and distinctive application of emotional labor strategies. The results indicate that on the extents, deep impersonation can be promoted by external conditions (guidance from experts, personal terms and team cohesiveness) and personal motivation (sufficient preparation, self learning, seeking for personal satisfaction and responsibility), which is different from superficial impersonation; on the manifestations, influential factors include personality, personal emotion status and breach of faith from clients, and employees’ process mode differs after repressing and releasing; on the differentiation, debt collectors apply different strategies based on different groups of clients; and the distinction on the application of emotional labor strategies further explicates the effects of emotional labor on performance in practical work.From above three levels, the present thesis illustrates the effects of emotional labor strategies on performance in collecting debt of credit card systematically. The author rethinks the shortcomings of the present study and makes several suggestions to the future research at the end of the dissertation.