The regulation of emotions, life satisfaction, and burnout in post-office service- job employees

To what extent, in what context and with what psychological consequences do service workers regulate their emotions so that they are in line with their job requirements? To answer these questions 30 Italian men and 71 women (22-61 years of age) mostly working at the counter at various branches of the Post Office located in the Veneto region were administered a questionnaire comprising several scales, as well as questions on sociodemographic and work-related variables. The results showed that Emotional labour (Hochschild 1983; Grandey 1999) is a relevant variable of post office service jobs: Workers perform both (a) surface acting, i.e., control the expression of their emotions vis-a-vis a client so that they are contextually appropriate (for example, they smile to an annoying client), and (b) deep acting, i.e., try to actually feel the required emotion; (c) feeling genuine emotions, i.e., the employee effortlessly feels the required emotions, is however also a frequent experience in these service jobs. Surface acting, not surprisingly, is negatively related to feeling genuine emotions. As regards the correlates of emotional labour that were measured in this study, the following main results were obtained. Feeling genuine emotions was found to be related positively to Life satisfaction (Diener 1984), but negatively to Job realization, Emotional exaustion, and Depersonalization (i.e., the burnout components; older subjects tend to report higher burnout levels). Subjects who feel frequently genuine emotions also reported a lower frequency of Negative affect (measured by a modified version of Panas; Watson et al. 1988) in their life in the past two weeks, and a greater frequency of Positive affect - the latter in turn was positively related to Life satisfaction. Surface acting was instead positively related to Emotional exaustion and Depersonalization (similar results were obtained for deep acting, but it should be noted that in this study there was a high positive correlation between deep and surface acting). Emotionally exausted and depersonalized subjects felt a low level of Job realization, and reported little life satisfaction, a high frequency of Negative affect, and a low frequency of Positive affect. In general no significant differences between men and women, or as a function of civil status and number of children were observed - there were exceptions to this trend; for instance, women feel genuine emotions more than men, whereas the opposite is true for surface acting; women with children perform more deep acting than women without children; older subjects perfom less surface acting than younger ones). Not supported, too, were the hypotheses that feeling genuine emotions is less likely the longer the interactions with clients, or the more frequent they are. Finally, the higher the number of years spent in the present job position the greater their Job Involvement and Work Realization, but coupled with a higher depersonalization feeling. Finally, the results showed that subjects who report high social desirability scores tend to report feeling more often genuine emotions, performing more deep acting, and being more satisfied with their life than subjects who obtain low social desirability scores. Implications of this study for future research on the construct of emotional labour, and on its correlates, will be discussed.